"Salience": A factor which can override temporal contiguity in taste-aversion learning.

Abstract

Poisoned naive rats following the ingestion of 1 novel solution and then another. Ss showed a consistent tendency to associate poisoning more with certain solutions than with others. "Salience," or the relative tendency of a novel solution to be associated with a poison, is a stable and transitive property of the solutions employed. The salience of a solution is a more potent predictor of acquired aversion than temporal proximity to the poisoning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)