learned flavor aversion

n. An avoidance of a flavor usually associated in the past with illness. The learning of food aversion often occurs in a single trial even if several hours elapse between eating and becoming sick. These flavor aversions are extremely resistant to extinction as many animals will never again eat anything with the flavor to which they have learned to be avoidant; some rats have starved to death rather than eat food which had made them sick in the past. In one-trial learning, an animal learns to avoid a food after it has been sickened and especially if it has regurgitated after having eaten that food, whereas other stimuli such as buzzers and flashing lights do not produce such one-trial learning. This was important in showing that not all learning was equivalent, as had been supposed by behavioral theorists. Also called the Garcia effect.