Adult (> P60) and preweanling (i.e., < P21 days) rats generally do not express preferences for visual, tactile or taste cues (conditional stimuli, CSs) that had been earlier paired with the postingestive effects of alcohol (unconditional stimulus, US). On the contrary, the predominant motivational effects of this association are aversive, as indexed by rats avoiding the ethanol-paired texture or rejecting the taste previously paired with ethanol (Cunningham et al., 1993; Pautassi et al., 2002). However, tactile conditioned preferences mediated by postabsorptive ethanol have been found recently in preweanling infant rats by means of a relatively novel experimental preparation that makes use of second-order conditioning (SOC; Molina et al., 2006; 2007).
