The aversion reduces consuming the same substance (or something that tastes similar) in the future, thus avoiding poisoning.
Conditioned taste aversion can occur when sickness is merely coincidental to, and not caused by, the substance consumed.
Under these circumstances, conditioned taste aversion is sometimes known as the sauce-bearnaise syndrome, a term coined by Seligman and Hager.
[2] While studying the effects of radiation on various behaviors in the mid to late 1950s, Garcia noticed that rats developed an aversion to substances consumed prior to being irradiated.
This finding was surprising in that the aversion could occur after just a single trial and with a long delay between the stimuli.
Most research at the time found that learning required multiple trials and shorter latencies.
Conditioned taste aversion is often used in laboratories to study gustation and learning in rats.
[4] The diet of common vampire bats only consists of vertebrate blood and therefore it is hypothesized that the development of a taste aversion to their only food source would not be advantageous for these animals.
Taste aversion has been demonstrated in a wide variety of both captive and free-ranging predators.
Stimulus generalization is another learning phenomenon that can be illustrated by conditioned taste aversion.
Rats tested with a sucrose solution paired with a drug that gave positive, euphoric effects, such as amphetamine, cocaine, and morphine emitted positive reactions to the drugs, yet they avoided approaching these solutions.