Abstract
Animals are neophobic to novel stimuli, including taste. An established understanding of attenuation of taste neophobia in rats is that rats approach and consume novel tastes, but limit their consumption to avoid becoming poisoned. Then, across sessions of repeated taste exposure, familiarization with the taste increases. Subsequently, a rat's fear of the novel taste will attenuate, and their perceived palatability of the taste will increase. This is measured in the amount of tastant consumed across sessions increasing (bulk consumption), and the number of pauses between bursts of licking decreasing. Saccharin is a commonly used taste in these paradigms, as it has a bitter and sweet component. There is nascent evidence that neophobia to saccharin attenuates not only across days, but within days as well. In experiment 1, I not only reproduce these findings but show that the number of pauses in licking to saccharin sharply decreases after just the first 15 seconds of saccharin exposure. I argue that this sharp change is not accounted for by the current understanding of neophobia. This is supported by experiment 2, where I show that a full attenuation of the pausing behavior does not necessarily signify a full attenuation of neophobia as bulk consumption does not fully increase.