Food-conditioned Eating Preferences and Aversions with Interoceptive Elements: Conditioned Appetites and Satieties z D. A. BOOTHa zyxw Department zyxw of Psychology University of Birmingham Birmingham B15 zyxwv 2TT England zyxw The adaptive importance of acquired feeding habits has long been acknowledged in research on obesity’ and animal foraging’ for example. Yet zyx so few experiments have measured learning under physiologically and ecologically normal conditions that there is insufficient information for effective applications in the clinic and everyday life,3 the foods‘ or pharmaceuticals5 industries, or animal husbandry.’ Nevertheless, it has been established that normal feeding in the laboratory rat is associatively conditioned by nutritional consequence^.^^'^ Occasionally, aversions are conditioned. However, what is usually learned is facilitation of feeding (TABLE l), which accounts for much of the incentive to forage and the palatability of foods and drink^.'^ CONDITIONING IN Allowance for aversionlpreference selection. NUTRIENT SELF-SELECTION conditioning is crucial in research on dietary Behavioral Compensation for Deficiency Davies” reported that human infants showed considerable “nutritional wisdom” when fed what they appeared to want from among an array of “natural” foodstuffs. The infants stayed healthy; some symptoms of nutritional deficiency even remitted. Experiments in rats suffering from serious nutritional deficiencies (or from dietarily ameliorable hormonal disorders) demonstrated corrective selection among diets con- centrated in different nutrients.” This indicated a considerable range of “nutritional wisdom” in the organization of the behavior of omnivores other than humans as well. Such results have often been subsumed under “homeostatic regulation.” This is either a non-explanatory classification of the observations or the invocation of a mis- leading and dubiously complex model. There is no evidence that ingestive behavior, or indeed any other behavioral or physiological activity, is controlled by a pre- determined and measured “set point” of some physiological characteristic, such as Address correspondence to: Dr. D. A. Booth, Department of Psychology, University of Bir- mingham, P. 0. Box 363, Birmingham B15 2TT. England. 22