Short-term flavour memory in the rat

In a series of experiments, rats were exposed twice to a flavour at times T1 and T2, and the second of these exposures was followed by toxicosis. The level of the subsequent aversion was viewed as an index of whether the flavour had been recognised as familiar at T2, with a familiar flavour accruing less aversiveness than an unfamiliar one. A flavour was recognised as familiar at time T2 after a long flavour-exposure at time T1 (Experiment Ia) when moderate (3·5 h) and long (27·5 h) T1-T2 intervals were employed but was so recognised after a brief exposure at T1 (Experiment Ib) only when a moderate T1-T2 interval was employed. The memorial processes underlying flavour recognition after a brief flavour exposure were assumed, therefore, to be transient. The remaining experiments employed a brief flavour exposure at T1 and moderate T1-T2 intervals in various attempts to disrupt flavour recognition. Recognition at T2, however, was not disrupted when one (Experiment II), or three (Experiment IV) distractor flavours were interpolated between the target flavour's presentations at T1 and T2. This failure was not due to the distractor having proactively interfered with the associability of the target flavour with illness at T2 (Experiment III). Further, recognition was not disrupted when the position of the target flavour's presentation at T1 was varied across a list of distractor flavours (Experiment V), nor when the similarity of the distractor and the target flavour was varied (Experiment VI). The results indicate that the processes subserving recognition after a brief presentation of that flavour, although transient, are resistant to interference and were discussed in terms of current theories of short-term memory in animals.