After making your mind map for the article, briefly discuss the article. Here are some questions that might help you formulate your response. You pretty much have the freedom to respond how you see fit. However please write with some authority over the topic (Let me know if this doesn't make sense).
What did you find interesting? What were some of the main points? Why did the authors write the article? How does the text and your reader handle the related material if any? What do think the impact of this article was / is? How does it relate to the other articles we have read so far?
Well as a whole I found this article to be rather interesting. I didn't realize there were that many theories or research on the topic of taste aversion. I enjoyed reading about the different ideas. It made me start thinking about my own cases of taste aversion. Some food I will no longer eat, some I can barely stand the smell of, simply because I associated them with some negative consequence. I now avoid those stimuli, for example those wafer cookies. I used to eat them for lunch at school almost everyday and one time I got very sick. It may or may not have had anything to do with those cookies but in my mind it did. This is a small part of what they mentioned in the article. The idea that even though there are other things, stimuli, the negative consequence could be associated with, there are certain stimuli that tend to be associated with others. This "preparedness" as they called it is quite common in these situations. They also discussed with the rats the idea of novelty and the large role it played. The rats often associated their sickness with the novel taste over the "well-known" taste they had previously experienced. This is like another experience I had. The family decided to eat at country kitchen and I decided to try something new, chicken fried steak, and later developed a migraine that lasted for 10 hours. Although there were many other things I did, and a few others I tasted, throughout the day, I still chose to associate it with that meal. To this day I am still a little unsure of chicken fried steak. I also enjoyed the end where they were discussing how this may or may not be related to the idea of shock avoidance. The idea that it may not be the case that the stimulus is associated with some kind of safety, but rather the stimulus has not true meaning except for when/if it is actually paired with something negative. After reading this I have to say I agree with the learned-safety theory. I would still need to read up on the other theories before deciding because this is only one study.
I also did some reading in the book on the topic and found an interesting experiment. The study involved rats and quail. Each was given a solution, salty and blue in color, and it made them each ill. Then the experimenters changed the liquids. One was left blue but contained no added salt. The other contained salt but was clear. The rats, who rely on the smell of their foods, chose the blue. The quail, however, who rely on sight, chose the clear water. This is an example of the differences among species on how tast aversion is learned. Not all animals obtain it the same way, but it is essential to survival for all. For both the rat and the quail, there was preparedness involved. According to the text preparedness means being bilogically more ready/willing to discriminate between stimuli. How one discriminates is not the same as others. I would say that the article is well backed by the text book. I would say the article was written to show whether or not the learned safety theory is a reliable way to expalain taste aversion. It is also meant to inform, or teach, those who read it more about the phenomenon. I am not sure, but I think Ican say rather comfortably that after some individuals read this their opinions may have been more strongly enforced or maybe even adjusted.
As would be expected from a class focused on behavior and learning, this article still carries the idea of conditioning. When they researches were working with the rats they were trying to condition them to obtain a taste aversion to the given stimulus.
This article by Kalat and Rozin was interesting. I expected the rats to relate the poisoning with the closer time rather than a longer. The results showed that the time really didn’t make a huge difference in relating to the poisoning. I also found the learning process theory interesting. I can relate to this one quite well. Over Christmas break two years ago I got sick after one of our families Christmas parties two days before Christmas. To this day I can’t eat my moms strawberry salad. I ate other things that night and I know it wasn’t the salad that made me sick but that’s what I related it to. I know it wasn’t the salad specifically because I was the only one to get sick. I was sick for three days and missed out on the Christmas festivities. I did have a bit of a spontaneous recovery this year and I tried to eat strawberry salad again but couldn’t.
But back to the article the main point was taste aversion and how the conditioned stimulus and unconditioned stimulus affected taste aversion to a poison that was placed in the rats’ water. The article described two experiments where poisons were placed at different times and at different ratios in the rat’s waters.
I think the authors wrote this article to prove that both experiments showed support towards the conditioned stimulus unconditioned stimulus delay a learning process not a forgetting process. The authors talk about other theories throughout the article such as the trace-decay which is where the rat’s memory forgets about the poison after a 6 hr delay. It shows the rat might remember the poison but it’s to long ago to relate it to the water or aftertaste.
The text discusses taste aversion learning in chapter 7. It gives an example of an experiment with quail and rats. They were given blue colored water that was very salty and then made them sick. Then they were offered clear water that was salty or blue water that was normal. The rats drank the blue water and the quail drank the salty water. The experiment proved that rats rely on taste sensitivity and smell and the quail rely on visual cues. The test then discusses how quail pick their food on a visual perception and rats stayed away from the salty taste because they related it to sickness.
When I started reading the article I was a little confused with all the information that was given. Once I got the idea of the study and what they were looking for I was able to understand a bit better. I think the article could have been written in a way that was much easier to understand and still gotten all the information across. I think taste aversion is an interesting area and it’s not only brought on by sickness but unpleasant memories and other stimuli as well. The article does prove its point that the learning theory is effective and not the forgetting theory.
This article relates to the little Albert study in that in both experiments Albert and the rats were conditioned to not like a certain stimulus. Albert was conditioned to fear a white rat. In the text the rats were conditioned not to drink the salty water and the quail not to drink the blue water. In the article the rats learned that certain water made them sick. In all of these experiments the participants were conditioned to fear or reject something.
That is a good point. I never really thought about the specific example of little Albert. It is the same basic principle but I didn't put in that context. They were seeing if it was possible in his study and in the current study they were examining they "why" and "how" of it. I found it a little confusing too. The parts about the different groups and what kind of drink they recieved was especially hard for me, but I found the rest of it to be pretty easy to follow. After reading those same parts in the text I started wondering how it is for humans. Rats go by smells and quail but color, but what is it exactly that we use to classify or associate different stimuli with? I am not sure why I am so quick to blame certain stimuli over others. I also wonder why we don't always associate things they their cause. I can knowingly get sick from something but I do not obtain an aversion to it.
After reading this article, I must admit, I was a little confused as to what the authors were trying to prove. However, a second reading assured me that the article was about taste aversion and the role that a conditioned stimulus and unconditioned stimulus played on taste aversion in rats. The authors conducted two experiments – one to assess trace-decay theories and the other to assess learned-safety theories. Each rat was given a poisoned solution and then tested on the rat’s familiarity with the poison. The trace-decay theory states that, over time, a rat’s memory will cause them to forget a solution within a few hours after drinking it, leading them to drink the poison again. The learned-safety theory states that the rat would have an imbedded memory of the solution and its taste/small causing it to be able to determine whether future solutions were “safe”.
After reading about the conclusion of each theory, I feel that the learned-safety theory was well supported. In many of the experiments the length of time between solutions did not make a significant difference in determining whether or not a rat would drink the solution. However, more often, the rats were found to be cautious when approaching a solution prior to the poisoned solution. Once the solution could be smelled, and even more so after it was tasted, the rats seemed to easily be able to determine that the solution did not contain the poison. To prove against the trace-decay theory, many of the rats were able to determine which solution was poisoned and which was not after 1-3 days after given the initial poisoned solution. Prior to the tests, experimenters thought that a mere six hours would erase the rat’s memory of the poisoned solution.
The article can relate directly to the text in which there is an experiment relating to quails and rats. Given a blue/salty solution that made the two animals sick, they were then given a blue/water solution and a salty/water solution to choose from. The quails, relying on sight alone, chose the salty/water solution causing them to, again, become sick. The rats however, relied on their sense of smell and then taste and chose the blue/water solution. This just reinforces the learned-safety theory in rats and can reinforce the assumption that, when given the poisoned solution, the rats used their smell and taste senses to determine what solutions were equivalent to poison.
These experiments can easily be related to each and everyone’s life. We have all had a situation in which a food or drink “made” us sick. Though we may not truly be able to determine the cause of our sickness, there are many other conditions that could have had an effect on our physical state, we related the sickness to something that was new and unfamiliar - something that, as an unconditioned stimulus, we directly relate to the cause of our sudden sickness even with no evidence to back it. We are all conditioned through the learned-safety theory. If something appears to be safe with no harmful outcomes, then it is imbedded in our minds to be ok. However, if after consuming the unconditioned stimulus and we become sick, it is then conditioned to be harmful and something to stay away from.
I found this article more difficult to read than the previous articles. In general, it was interesting.
Many theories have tried to explain the difference between taste-aversion learning and other types of learning. The aftertaste theory holds that although the delay between taste and poison is relatively long, there are still traces of the taste in the stomach or blood. This ‘aftertaste’ then interferes with the delay. The interference-plus-belonging theory proposes that certain stimuli are preferentially associated with certain other stimuli. Therefore, despite a relatively long delay between taste and poison, the unconditioned stimulus introduces other conditioned stimulus. The unconditioned stimulus is then more familiar with the more recent conditioned stimulus it has been exposed to as opposed to the actual experimental conditioned stimulus. Both of these theories have been found to be inadequate in explaining the difference between taste-aversion learning and other types of learning.
Other theories proposed to explain this phenomenon are the ‘trace decay’ theory and the ‘learned-safety’ theory. The trace decay theory suggests that the conditioned stimulus decays during the time of delay. The learned safety theory suggests that the rat learns the taste is ‘safe’ during the time of delay. Researchers then did two experiments to test these theories.
The results of both experiments provided support for the ‘learned-safety’ theory more than the ‘trace decay’ theory. They found that the rats were learning during the time of delay rather than forgetting. However, the time of delay does matter. They learn slowly that the taste is safe; therefore, the delay period needs to be fairly long. The rats’ previous experience can also affect this.
One thing that sparked my interest was shock-avoidance learning and behavior in the general discussion section of the article. After reading the textbook, I now know that avoidance may involve responding when a warning signal precedes an aversive stimulus. Also, the time between eliciting stimulus and the appearance of the reflexive response is known as the law of latency. The article refers to this as phenomenon as latent inhibition. The textbook defined the procedures used in the article as delayed conditioning procedures. Delayed conditioning is the presentation of the unconditioned stimulus slightly delayed relative to the conditioned stimulus. As found in the article, the text said the time of delay determines the effectiveness of conditioning.
Overall, the article was pretty interesting. Even though it was set up like a true research article, it took me several times of reading it and making notes to really grasp the concept. I’m not sure why this one was personally more difficult of a read than some of the other ones.
I've been dreading this article for awhile. It is full of obscure graphs, other peoples studies, and jargon packed paragraphs that you have to decipher line by line. I think it was good practice on how to read a real research article. However, after re-reading it again and making another mind map I still feel lost. It may be true that rats go through a learning process like Kalat & Rozin say, but I'm still grasping at the significance of this article. It may be good in some degree to figure out taste aversion and its principles of working.
The two authors seemed to have a fiery passion about their topic. I was really curious as to why they would want to research such a topic so in-depthly. I did a quick search on google to find out a history on these guys and found some crazy stuff. These psychologists, Paul Rozin, for example, have dedicated their whole life to cuisine, tastes and most heavily how these things affect different cultures. I saw that Paul was in the new series on National Geographic "TABOO" giving commentary on the episode entitled "Would You Eat This?" The link is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icHMAwhkURs (He's about halfway through it, the grey bearded guy.)
These guys' research obviously holds some weight. Maybe not when it was published in the 70's, but it clearly gathered some headway as the years rolled on.
Kalat and Rozin proposed a new dynamic in this taste aversion theory, that was learned safety. Kalat and Rozin didn't wholly adhere to the trace decay theory, or Revusky's CS-UC confusion belongingness theory. They thought these were pretty decent answers, but they couldn't go far enough to explain the entire issue. They even partially rejected the Long Delay theory, which proposed rats remember tastes by mucus, blood, or regurgitation where they re-taste the stimulus. They posit that that rat goes through a "learning process" rather than an unlearning process like trace-decay. To K&R the rat seems to think "okay, i drank this...no harm no foul." then they would learn (not forget), during the delay time. Even days later when the rats were tested they could determine which solution was safe by taste and smell, even though they were hesitant. If the trace-decay theory were true, rats would have forgotten this by now and would have shown no hesitance in picking a solution. These experiments support K&R's hypothesis.
After a little extra digging and research the Kalat and Rozin article becomes a little more clear to me. These are some dudes that carry some clout in the psychology field. This is some of the work they built their careers on. Not only was it groundbreaking and disproved other theories, it can also help us understand some things about humans. Our likings, dislikes, acquisition methods (and maybe the lack of, McDonalds comes to mind) and how we pick food to aid in our survival.
This article was a little more difficult to read than some of the others we have read. I think this is partly due to the audience the article was written for. For the most part it seems to have been written for other researchers of the same area. However, it was an interesting read. I had never thought about taste aversion before and how it goes against many of the ‘laws’ of learning. It is crazy that one can develop a taste aversion after just one experience, hours after ingesting the substance.
I myself have an aversion to onions in general. I had an awful experience making French onion soup that caused me to be sick. Now, I have a crazy sense for when onions are being cooked or are in my food. I had never thought about how just one bad experience changed my views on onions for a long time.
It was interesting to read the different theories of taste aversion. Some seemed a little far-fetched. For example, the aftertaste theory, where one is able to develop a taste aversion only during the time when there is some sort of aftertaste in one’s body. I do agree with the theory that taste aversion is a learned experience, however, I do not agree with the learned safety theory. My main issue with that theory, as stated in the article, is that if the theory is true, one approaches every new food with the assumption it may be dangerous. I do not feel as though that is true.
Finally, there was a lot of information about taste aversion in the text. Much of the information had been covered in the article as well. I did find it interesting that some believe taste aversion could be linked to anorexia. I would have never considered that.
After reading the article the first time by Kalat & Razin, I was confused about what the article was written for. I initial thought was that they were experimenting on taste and would then associate their findings in rats to humans and other animals. Upon reading the article a second time I came to find out that I was right only about the taste aspect of the article. The article emphasized the learned safety theory. By conducting two experiments with rats the authors were able to give support to the learned safety theory. In the first experiment the authors were investigating the importance of the taste aversion theory. All rats in this experiment were given mildly poisonous solutions on delayed time schedules. The authors determined that the little experience with the liquid would attribute to the rats acceptance over time. In the second experiment the authors investigated if the rats gradually learns if the solution is safe or harmful. Rats in this experiment were given solutions and each group received a different solution. One group received a slightly poisonous solution and the other a normal solution. The rats who initially received the poisonous solution were hesitant to drink when retested. The rats could identify that the solution was poison either by smelling or tasting the solution. The rats learned from their first experience to not drink the poison and give support to the learned safety theory.
The text also talks about taste aversion and talks about a similar study done with quails and rats. In this experiment the animals were given blue salty water that made them sick. The text suggested that the animals underwent a survival technique called preparedness. The animals associated the bad taste/smell with sickness and then would hesitate to drink the liquid. I feel that all organisms use this in order to determine what foods/liquids to consume. The organisms that can not do this well will eventually die out because they can not learn harmful from ok items. One personal example I can think of was when I was a child I accidently drank some of my grandmas coffee. After I tasted it I got sick and threw up for the rest of the day. This resulted in every time I smell coffee I get sick and have to stop myself from puking.