The role of odor in the maintenance of flavor aversion

Abstract Maintenance of toxicosis-induced flavor aversion in the hooded rat requires continuing identification of the conditioning stimulus with a minimum of ingestion. Odor can act as a critical cue in such identification, allowing the rat to avoid the conditioning stimulus altogether, even when this stimulus is restricted to solutions that are typically judged to be non-olfactory (NaCl and sucrose) and which must be selected from among other such solutions in the test situation. Availability of such odor cues allowed rats to maintain their aversion more than twice as long as either bulbectomized rats, or rats in which testing occurred in the continuous presence of masking odors.