deejay
Posts: 113
Joined: June 2006
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You know, that wikipedia article is so bad, I thought I'd try to do a quick summary for anyone who is interested. The article does mention one part of the study, namely that if you irradiate mice after letting them drink sweetened water, they quickly learn not to drink the sweetened water because they associate the radiation-induced nausea with the flavored water. No surprises there, except that the learning took place faster than conditioning models suggested.
But there's more to the story, at least if I recall my professor's summary accurately. If you rigged the water bottle so that it clicked every time the rat drank, and then irradiated the rat later on, it would not avoid the clicking water.
However, if you shocked the rat after it drank the clicking water, it would avoid the clicking water. If you shocked the rat after giving it sweetened water, it would not avoid the sweetened water.
At the time, classical conditioning models held that there didn't have to be any sort of intrinsic similarity between two cues in order to associate them. The study elegantly showed that some connections are easier to make than others.
I got food poisoning after eating some bad fish in the first grade, and to this day, I simply can't eat seafood. It just tastes wrong.
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