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| Poster #177 The Impact of Taste Hedonics on Latent Enhancement of Aversion Learning |
| William T McCormick, Dallas Shuman, Veronica L Flores Furman University, Greenville, SC, United States |
Conditioned taste aversion (CTA) is an intensively studied learning paradigm whereby animals are trained to avoid a taste that has been paired with malaise. Our research has shown that previous benign experience with salty and sour tastes enhances an aversion towards novel sucrose (Flores 2016) -- we have called this phenomenon Latent Enhancement (LE) of aversion learning. LE was associated with enhanced learning-related cFOS expression in gustatory cortex – a region known to process taste learning (GC, Flores 2018). Given that sucrose produces a strong dopaminergic response, it is possible that the LE effect on learning is dependent on the hedonics of sucrose. Here, we hypothesize that LE is not limited to using sucrose as a conditioned stimulus. Long Evans rats (n=9) receive benign experience with sucrose and citric acid prior to learning an aversion towards sodium chloride after which cFOS expression is examined in GC and the nucleus accumbens. After pairing sucrose with an aversion, studies have reported a reduced response in nucleus accumbens signifying a reduction in dopamine. Since our LE paradigm produces a strong aversion, we ask how this activity in nucleus accumbens shifts after taste experience when using different conditioned stimuli (i.e., sucrose versus sodium chloride). We hypothesize that exposure to tastes will reduce dopamine activity in nucleus accumbens post aversion learning when compared to non-experienced aversion controls and that this drop will be greater for sucrose than for sodium chloride. Our data show a replication of the LE effect using sodium chloride as the conditioned stimulus although we did not see an increase in cFOS activity within GC. These results support the LE phenomenon and give insight into the plasticity mechanisms underlying strong aversion learning. |