Student's Names: Regan Rickert & Sharon Conley

Date: April 1, 1997

Important Person's Name: John Garcia

I. Personal History - Describe the person's life and times. Birth date, family history, marriage, children, important historical events during their life, and date and cause of death.

John Garcia was born in Santa Rosa, California on June 12, 1917. He was married in 1943 and has three children. Garcia has won two honors and awards. The first award he won was the Howard Crobsy Warren medal. He received this award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1978. The Distinguished Scientific Contribution award was the second he won and it was presented to him by the American Psychological Association in 1979. John Garcia is still alive and is presently the President of the Western Psychological Association. He is also currently working as a professor in psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

II. Professional career - Describe the person's educational history and academic or professional career.

John Garcia received his bacholers in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1948. He went on to receive his masters in 1949. Garcia eventually became licensed as a PhD in psychology in 1965.

He began his professional career as a teaching assistant in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley from 1949 to 1951. Garcia then moved to San Franciso and was a psychologist at the US Naval Radio 1 Defense Lab from 1951 to 1958. For the following year, he taught biology at Oakland Public Schools in California. From 1959 to 1965, Garcia became assistant professor of psychology at California state college in Long Beach. During this time, he was also a consultant in Neurophysiology at Long Beach Verteran Administrative hospital. For the next three years, he was associate biologist of neurosurgery services at Massachusetts General Hospital. At this time, he was concurrently lecturering in psychology at Harvard Medical School in Boston and also lectured at the international brain research seminar in Kotor, Yugoslavia in 1969. After those three years, Garcia moved to New york and became a professor in psychology from 1968 to 1971 at a state university in Stony brook. He was also the chairman of the Psychobiology Program in 1971. From 1972 to 1973 Garcia lived in Salt Lake City and was a professor there. For the following year, he was a national lecturer for Sigma Xi in the southwestern states. He was also a distinguished lecturer at the University of Illinois in 1981. He is currently working as a professor in Los Angeles and is also, the President of the Western Psychological Association.

III. Scholarly works - List the scholarly articles and books, relevant to learning and memory, that the person authored during their career. Please use APA format.

Garcia, J. (1995). Brain and behavior: Bridging the barranca. In J. L. McGrAugh, F. Bermudez-Rattoni, & R. A. Prado (Ed.), Plasticity in the central nervous system: Learning and memory (pp. 1-16). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Garcia, J. (1995). Mind is back in control of Pavlovian and Skinnerian responses: Was it ever away? Journal of Behavioral Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 26(3), 229-234.

Garcia, J., & R. A. Koelling. (1996). Relation of cue to consequence in avoidance learning. InL. D. Houck, & L.C. Drickamer (Ed.), Foundations of animal behavior: Classic papers with commentaries (pp. 374-375). Chicago Il: University of Chicago Press.

Garcia, J., Brett, Phillips, L., Rusiniak, Kenneth, W. (1989). Limits of Darwin Conditioning. In S. B. Klein, and R. R. Mowrer (Ed.), Contemporary learning theories: Instrumental conditioning theory and the impact of biological constraits on learning (p. 293). Los Angeles, Ca: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Garcia, J. (1989). Food for Tolman: Cognition and cathexis in concert. In T. Archer & L.G Nilsson (Ed.), Aversion, avoidance, and anxiety: Perspectives on aversively motivated behavior (p. 491). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Garcia, J., Robertson, G., & Rodrigo. (1988). Darwin was a learning theorist. In R.B. Bolles & M. D. Beecher (Ed.), Evolution and learning (pp. 17-38). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Abstracts - Based on your reading, provide an abstract of three of the author's works.

1. Food for Tolman: Cognition and Cathexis in Concert.

Garcia wrote this article in response to Edward Tolman. Tolman believes that there are two types of learning. One of these types is field expectancies (cognitive learning), such as classical conditioning. Tolman refers to the other as cathexis (emotions), such as food aversion. Garcia believes that comparing the two may help develop an explanation of learning and behavior.

Garcia uses different aspects of taste aversion to demonstrate how cognition and emotions work together to help form associations and aversions. He writes that most associations take a number of pairings to learn, such as in Pavlov's classical conditioning in dogs. Taste aversion, however, is learned with just one trial. Another difference between classical conditioning and taste aversion is that conditioned flavor aversion can be learned even when the interval between the subjects tasting the flavor and the subject getting nauseous is prolonged for hours. On the contrary, in most associations the interval between the two stimuli has to be within two seconds of each other. According to Garcia, these associations , may be learned quickly because of cognition working with cathexis.

Garcia also discusses the processing of stimuli. He compares the cognitive process with the affective, or emotional process. He concludes after doing research, that if you poison the CS, there is little effect on the instrumental response. However, there is a huge effect on the consumption of the flavor. In other words, if the rat has learned to run a maze for food, then you poison the food, the rat will continue to run the maze, but will not eat the food. Briefly, the rat will continue to do what he has learned (cognition), but will avoid the flavor because of illness (emotion).

Another idea Garcia studied was the cue-consequence factor. He did research to discover what cues animals use to dictate their response in a situation. Garcia chose two cues to study, these were the size of the food pellet, and the taste of the pellet. These were placed with two forms of punishment. These consisted of either a shock to the feet or an illness. Garcia found a strong association between the size of the food pellet and the shock, as well as between the taste of the food pellet and nausea. On the contrary, he found weak associations between the size of the pellet and nausea, and also between the taste and foot shock. The difference in the associations in these subjects are due to evolution and self defense systems, according to Garcia.

The last aspect of this article I will discuss deals with another factor of taste aversion. Garcia did research on using reinforcers which the subject once liked, but now avoids. He concludes that a rat presses a lever a number of times for a pellet. If the rat is now aversive to the pellet, for what ever reason, he will continue to press the lever, but at a slower rate then he would if he still wanted the pellet. Keep in mind that the rat will not eat the pellet, but will continue pressing the lever. Again you can see how cognition and emotion work together in learning and behavior.

Throughout this article Garcia discusses many other aspects of taste aversion. I chose and presented the points which I saw more interesting.

2. Role of Temporal Order and Odor Intensity in Taste-potentiated Odor Aversions.

This is a journal article on a study completed by John Garcia and Mark D Holder. They were interested in the role of the temporal order of the odor and taste and odor intensity, in potentiation of an odor aversion stimulated by taste. They carried out three experiments in order to come to their conclusions about this topic.

Experiment 1 was a between groups design. There was five groups of rats. Each group was presented with an odor for two minutes. Then, 30 minutes later they were given a toxin intragastrically. In one group the odor was presented to them 90 seconds before a 2 minute taste exposure. For the second group the odor and taste were given simultaneously for 2 minutes. The third group was introduced to the odor 90 seconds after the 2 minute taste exposure. The last two groups were never given the taste. In this experiment, they found that the timing of odor and taste did not effect the establishment of a taste-illness association. Although the timing did not have an effect on the latter, it may be crucial to the development to odor-illness associations.

Almost the same procedure was conducted in experiment 2. The differences were that each rat was presented with two odors, and the interval was 45 seconds rather then 90 seconds. The first trial consisted of the odor being presented. The second trial was the presentation of the taste, then the third presented the second odor. Again, 30 minutes after the taste, the rats were poisoned. The experimenters used two odors because a rat is introduced to many odors in it's normal environment. The aversion was then in the first experiment.

Experiment 3 focused on odor intensity and taste-potentiated odor aversions. The subjects were 42 male rats. The procedure was the same except they made the odor stronger when they blew it into the rat's surroundings. Again, there was no more of an aversion to the taste then in experiment 1. However, when the odor increased and the taste stayed the same, the odor aversion increased.

3. Behavioral Regulation of the Milieu Interne in Man and Rat.

In this article, Garcia, Hankins, and Rusiniak acknowledge and explain two problems of survival that animals suffer from. One deals with how the animals deal with the external environment. The other deals with the animals internal environment. In order to cope with the outside world animals depend on vision, audiation, and olfaction. These telereceptors help the animal focus on these goals if they are near or far. They give the animal direct information to avoid or approach the stimuli. In coping with the animals internal environment, the animal uses internal receptors. The animal depends on cognition, such as previous experiences, and evolution, which helps distinguish between good food and food which will produce illness. The problem with this is that the animal can distinguish the food by the taste if it caused illness, but not by the place in which he ate the food.

The authors also did research on bait-shyness. They discovered three rules. "First, all other conditions being equal, the stronger the taste of food, the greater the aversion induced by illness. Second, given a constant taste, the more severe the illness the stronger the aversion for that taste. Third, given a constant taste and an equivalent illness severity, the strength of the aversion is inversely related to the span of time between consumption and illness"(825). These principles disregard two rules of associative learning. One rule is the rule of contiguity, which states that the stimuli,either punishment or reward, must follow the response immediately, if learning is to occur. The second rule states, "that any perceptible stimulus can signal an animal that reward or punishment is eminent. This rule is violated because not any perceptible stimulus signals that rat. The rat only acquires an aversion to the taste of the food.

Garcia and the other authors also studied self regulatory functions in rats and men. They looked at the effects that temperature has on the subject. More interesting, they did research to identify how the subject reacts with too much or too little of a chemical in their internal system. Along with this, they try to identify if the effects are different according to when they were given the chemical, before or after eating.

The authors, lastly, put together all of this information on taste aversion and put it to work in a practical use, control of predation. They did research and discovered a way to stop coyotes from preying on lambs, by making the coyotes think that lambs made them ill. The coyotes not only stopped preying on the lambs, but also kept far away from them.