Taste aversion in rats induced by forced swimming, voluntary running, forced running, and lithium chloride injection treatments

The present experiment compared the strengths of taste aversion learning in rats induced by forced swimming in a water pool (5, 15, 30, or 60 min), voluntary running in an activity wheel (15, 30, 60, or 120 min), forced running in a motorized wheel (60 min at the speed of 8 m/min), optional running in the apparatus consisting of an activity wheel and a side room (120 min), and a lithium chloride (LiCl, 0.15 M LiCl at 2% of body weight) injection. The rats were given an access to saccharin solution immediately followed by one of the above treatments or simply returned back to the home cages for the control group. On the next 2 days, aversion to the saccharin solution was assessed by two-bottle choice testing between it and tap water. The following results were obtained. (1) The saccharin aversion was a positive function of exercise durations in the forced swimming and voluntary running rats, and the exercise of more than 30 min induced statistically significant saccharin aversion, compared with the control rats. (2) The forced running caused relatively strong saccharin aversion. The group of forced running rats acquired the numerically strongest saccharin aversion on average among all exercised rats. (3) The optional running treatment had little effect. (4) The LiCl injection resulted in the strongest aversion among the all treatments explored here.