Establishment and Modification of Food and Taste Preferences: Effects of Experience

Abstract

Summary Restricting an animal's diet early in life to a single food or flavor serves to enhance the preference value of that substance later in life. A primacy effect is most clearly found in precocial species, such as the domestic chicken; results for late maturing species is less certain. As for changes in food preferences, a chief concern is with the relationship between the kinds of cues involved in the aversive conditioning of food preferences. A theory of stimulus relevance indicates the likelihood of gustatory-olfactory cues becoming aversively conditioned to gastrointestinal discomfort, and auditory-visual cues to pain from electric shock. This suggests that learned associations—at least for the rat—are facilitated by a naturally occurring compatibility between exteroceptive events, such as color and shock, and between other events (e.g., flavor and gastrointestinal pain) functioning interoceptively. Furthermore, those associations between irrelevant events may be mediated by associations between relevant events. Nonaversive procedures of altering food preferences have been, in general, less effective than the aversive techniques. Manipulation of man's food habits is considered in light of anecdotal evidence on adults and experiments with children. Early experience and verbal controls appear to play an important part in one's later approaches to food.