Conditioned taste aversions and the learnt controls of food intake

The highlight for November is by David Booth in the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham in England. When reflecting on the individuals who have made impacts on the general field of taste aversion learning, I have always included Dr. Booth as one of the major players. It is interesting in this context that while much of his research has addressed conditioned taste aversions (see his careful extensions of the range of stimuli effective in serving CS and US functions), it is his work on feeding (and not necessarily its suppression) for which he is best known. For almost four decades, he has explored the associative factors involved in feeding, focusing primarily on how conditioning might increase and decrease food intake. Interestingly, this history with (and interest in) conditioning has allowed Dr. Booth to view feeding from a different perspective than those assessing the conditioned suppression of food intake. What is often viewed as an aversion may instead be satiety; consequently a conditioned suppression could reflect either process and would require additional investigation to determine which of these factors mediated the change in behavior. As he describes in his highlight, aversion learning is simply one procedure effective in modulating food intake. Over the years, he has argued quite convincingly that food regulation involves much more than the restraining influences of food aversions. Conditioned food preferences and conditioned satiety initiate and terminate feeding (and in a manner quite different than that effected by aversions). His work has been characterized by careful scrutiny of all of these multiple factors and the experimental conditions under which they are acquired and expressed. He has discussed these multiple factors not as simple elements (or atoms) that sum to control behaviour but as configural stimuli that go into multiple (horizontal and vertical) associations that ultimately control feeding. Feeding is complex; however, its understanding has been greatly increased by the work of Dr. Booth and his colleagues who have documented and evaluated its conditioned (and unconditioned) control and the manner by which this control is itself modulated by the multiple factors involved.