The purpose of the present experiment was to investigate the effects of prior CS presentations (habituation) on the acquisition of a CR during classical conditioning of the SCR. Six groups of Ss received either 1, 4, or 16 habituation trials. Each of the habituation conditions was divided into two groups during acquisition with one receiving 16 paired trials and the other receiving 16 unpaired trials. (1) The paired groups made significantly larger CRs across acquisition trials than the unpaired groups, (2) mean CR differences between the paired and unpaired groups increased directly as a function of habituation trials, and (3) while attenuation of the CR occurred for all groups, Ss who received 16 habituation trials in the paired CS‐UCS condition showed the least amount of response decrement. It was concluded that increased numbers of prior CS‐alone trials led to stronger conditioning. Differences between the results of this study and previous ones using skeletal response measures (latent inhibition) were noted.
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