Counter-conditioning Following Human Odor–Taste and Color–Taste Learning ☆

Abstract Tasting an odor in citric acid can result in that odor becoming less liked and sourer smelling. Both these changes appear to be resistant to extinction. As acquired hedonic responses to faces are also resistant to extinction, but amenable to counter-conditioning, the current experiment tested whether conditioned changes in odors could also be counter-conditioned. Presenting an odor in citric acid and then in sucrose did not change the perceptual and hedonic consequences of the initial pairing in citric acid. However, pairing a color with citric acid and then with sucrose produced a color–sweetness association. These findings are suggestive of a difference in counter-conditioning sensitivity between odors and other types of stimuli, which may result from encoding odor–taste mixtures in a relatively unanalyzed configural form.