Awareness is essential for differential delay eyeblink conditioning with soft-tone but not loud-tone conditioned stimuli

Abstract

The role of awareness in differential delay eyeblink conditioning (DEC) remains controversial. Here, we investigated the involvement of awareness in differential DEC with a soft or a loud tone as the conditioned stimulus (CS). In the experiment, 36 participants were trained in differential DEC with a soft tone (60 dB) or a loud tone (85 dB) as the CS, paired with a corneal air-puff as the unconditioned stimulus (US). After conditioning, awareness of the relationship between the CS and the US was assessed with a 17-item true/false questionnaire. Interestingly, during differential DEC with a soft-tone CS, a higher proportion of differential conditioned responses (CRs) was evident in participants who were aware than those who were unaware. In contrast, when a loud tone was used as the CS, the proportion of differential CRs of the aware participants did not differ signifi cantly from those who were unaware over any of the blocks of 20 trials. In unaware participants, the percentage of differential CRs with a loud-tone CS was significantly higher than that with a soft-tone CS; however in participants classified as aware, the percentage of differential CRs with a loud-tone CS did not differ significantly from that with a soft-tone CS. The present findings suggest that awareness is critical for differential DEC when the delay task is rendered more diffi cult.

The role of working memory and declarative memory in trace conditioning

“…Therefore, while trace conditioning appears to critically depend on awareness, data regarding the role of awareness in delay conditioning appears more equivocal. Interestingly, when unaware subjects were conditioned with a soft CS they poorly learned differential delay eyeblink conditioning compared to aware subjects, but unaware subjects conditioned with a loud CS showed no difference in conditioning to similarly conditioned aware individuals (Huang et al, 2014). This finding speaks to the importance of methodological and procedural factors that likely play a key part in unraveling the role of awareness in delay conditioning.…”

Caracterización de los tipos de respuesta de parpadeo en un procedimiento de condicionamiento discriminativo en humanos

“…Por otra parte, quizás la principal dificultad es la demostración de que un número sustancial de participantes, quienes, además de estar conscientes de las contingencias (Huang et al, 2014;Knuttinen, Power, Preston, & Disterhoft, 2001;Lovibond et al, 2011;Lovibond & Shanks, 2002;Weidemann, Best, Lee, & Lovibond, 2013;Weidemann & Antees, 2012), emiten las llamadas respuestas voluntarias (RV) (Goodrich, 1966;Gormezano, 1965;Rasmussen & Jirenhed, 2017;Spence & Ross, 1959). Específicamente, Spence y Ross (1959) mostraron que algunos sujetos dan una alta incidencia de respuestas que se caracterizan por un cierre fuerte, suave del párpado, con el ojo cerrado hasta después de que el soplo de aire es recibido.…”

Awareness and differential eyeblink conditioning: effects of manipulating auditory CS frequencies

“…The effects of CS discriminability on awareness and conditioning have been reported in fear conditioning studies (Knight et al 2003;Schultz and Helmstetter 2010;Singh et al 2013) but have not been directly investigated using EBC. While the majority of differential delay EBC studies used two distinct CSs (tone and white noise) that were fairly easy to discriminate, several have used two pure tones of varying frequencies as CSs and measured awareness (Ross and Nelson 1973;Nelson and Ross 1974;Huang et al 2014). These studies found that awareness was needed for differential delay EBC although another study reports contradictory findings (Smith et al 2005).…”