Discriminated taste aversion and context: a progress report

The research described here concerns the interaction between the environment (context), the organism, and the effects of opiates, focusing on how conditioning and contextual cues affect drug controlled behaviors. This analysis applies the powerful tool of drug discrimination to a respondent conditioning procedure (discriminated taste aversion, DTA). Data show that the use of DTA is feasible in that it is sensitive to morphine dose and saccharin concentration. Swifter control over DTA was achieved by increasing the LiCl dose (UCS magnitude). It is also clear that morphine alone can serve as a discriminative stimulus not requiring saccharin as a contextual element (which has been the case for most DTA studies to date), or saccharin being part of a compounded stimulus. Pharmacological specificity was demonstrated in substitution tests with delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol. This research continues a systematic experimental analysis of the interaction between drug-controlled behavior and context.