Rozin P & Kalat J W. Specific hungers and poison avoidance as adaptive specializations of learning. Psychol. Rev. 78:459-86, 1971

“In the 1930s and 1940s, Curt Richter and others demonstrated that rats deficient in particular nutrients would select foods that were rich in these nutrients. Rozin was attracted to this problem in the early 1960s because the phenomenon was simple, easy to obtain, and biologically significant. Furthermore, it seemed unlikely that all specific hungers could be explained either as innate mechanisms or as trial-and-error learning; some unknown principle had to be involved. “Work done by Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania, largely in collaboration with Willard Rodgers and later with Kalat, led to explanations involving the rat’s natural suspicion of new foods, its pattern of sampling dietary choices, and two new principles of learning, which were most clearly demonstrated by John Garcia. The It is argued that learning mechanisms differ in different situations, and are adapted, through evolution, to deal with particular problems faced by the organism. This point of view is illustrated by an analysis of the type of learning in specific hungers and poison avoidance. [The Social Sciences Citation Index® (SSCITM) indicates that this paper has been cited over 230 times since 1971.]