Are you a picky eater? Then you need to read this!

Have you been a picky eater all your life? If not, you might have at least had aversions or dislikes towards certain foods. Usually, aversions to certain foods occur primarily during childhood, and there is a science behind why you consider yourself a picky eater. For instance, your mom might have given you bitter gourds, which usually have a bitter taste. You might not like the taste of it and spit it out. When you see another similar vegetable in color and shape, you might have the tendency to generalize all vegetables as distasteful. "Generalization" transfers past learning to new situations and problems. If you had assumed that all vegetables taste bad after you had the experience of bitter gourd, you would generalize all vegetables under the category that they do not taste good, which is not valid. However, if you think that only vegetables similar to bitter gourd have a distaste, it is called specificity, which means you have narrowed down the options. 

There is another factor called stimulus control, which means that whatever you do now is under the control of the cues in the world, which means that whatever choice you make is under the control of that stimulus. For example, your choice of not wanting to eat bitter gourd wholly depends on the stimulus, which is the bitter gourd.

An experiment was conducted on pigeons to understand discrimination better. They were intradimensional discrimination training and extradimensional discrimination training. A group of pigeons received food in response to key pecking when a sound of 1000Hz was produced. Another group of pigeons received food in response to key pecking to a sound of 1000Hz but did not receive food to a similar sound frequency of 950Hz. Since this differentiation happens within a single factor, tone, it is called intradimensional discrimination. When animals learn to discriminate between different dimensions, it is called extradimensional discrimination. 

 So, that's all for today! Byee byeee, try not to be a picky eater and follow a balanced diet! :)