Food conditioning is impaired in cats deprived of the taste of food in early life.

Cats were fed by stomach tube during the first 75 days of their life. Thus, they were deprived of the taste of food and the food reward. The cats were then trained to find food behind the gate. They acquired this simple response very slowly and during the first weeks of training they often refused to eat the food reward. Moreover, they extinguished the response poorly. We conclude that the deprived cats did not originally perceive the food reward as attractive, but they were able to learn this, and they were poorly able to form both excitatory and inhibitory food conditioned connections.