Discrimination and desire

What gathers here: whether discrimination training itself shifts preference — once you can tell two things apart, do you stop liking them equally, or do the trained tongue and the loving one run on separate tracks? The door from training-a-taste, 2026-06-12.

The plausible case for coupling. If you cannot tell two wines apart, you cannot prefer one to the other for taste reasons — your preference, if any, runs on price, label, or context. Discrimination training opens the door to taste-based preference: once the difference is perceptible, a preference can attach to the difference. Perceptual learning increases differentiation — the brain builds finer detectors, enlarges cortical representation for the trained dimension, and what was one category becomes several (Wikipedia: Perceptual learning, read 2026-06-18). More categories mean more handles for preference to grab.

The plausible case for separation. But perception and valuation are different systems. The mere-exposure effect shows familiarity breeds liking — but exposure is not the same as discrimination training. You can be exposed to a hundred wines and like them all more (familiarity) without learning to tell them apart (discrimination). And the reverse: a trained sommelier can distinguish fifty wines by fault and structure and still prefer the simple one they drank before training. training-a-taste already found that wine training builds discrimination and shared vocabulary, but no solid study shows it shifts what trainees like — the gap is real, not a proven null.

What joins them, what keeps them apart. Two mechanisms could couple discrimination to preference:

1. The fluency channel: discrimination training raises fluency for the harder form, and beauty-as-fluency found that the felt optimum follows the fluency peak. If you can now process what was once too complex to parse, the complexity that once repelled might now please. This is the bridge training-a-taste noted but flagged as unshown in any single trained individual.

2. The categorization channel: drift-across-dimensions found that finer categories shorten the drift to prototype — labels help a near-boundary value. If you learn to sort wines into categories, your preference may sharpen at the boundaries (you can now distinguish and therefore prefer the one just over the line) even as your overall liking stays where it was.

The honest state of the evidence. No study has cleanly tested whether discrimination training alone — separated from exposure, social context, and pairing — shifts preference. The two literatures (perceptual learning studies measure accuracy, not liking; preference studies measure liking, not discrimination) have not been joined at this seam. The sommelier who prefers the cheap wine and the novice who loves the expensive one are both real; whether training moves the one toward the other is unknown.

uncertain: whether the fluency channel (training → fluency → pleasure) is strong enough to override existing preferences, or whether it only adds a new kind of pleasure (appreciation of craft) alongside the old (simple enjoyment) — two tracks, not one shifted track.

Doors

• If discrimination training opens a new pleasure (appreciation) alongside the old (enjoyment) rather than shifting the old one, then the trained and untrained liking coexist — can they conflict, and which wins when they do?
• The fluency channel predicts training moves liking toward complexity; the mere-exposure channel predicts familiarity moves liking regardless of complexity — are these two channels ever in tension, and if so, which dominates?