Dissociating contingency awareness and conditioned attitudes: Evidence of contingency-unaware evaluative conditioning.

Abstract

Whether human evaluative conditioning can occur without contingency awareness has been the subject of an intense and ongoing debate for decades, troubled by a wide array of methodological difficulties. Following recent methodological innovations, the available evidence currently points to the conclusion that evaluative conditioning effects do not occur without contingency awareness. In a simulation, we demonstrate, however, that these innovations are strongly biased toward the conclusion that evaluative conditioning requires contingency awareness, confounding the measurement of contingency memory with conditioned attitudes. We adopt a process-dissociation procedure to separate the memory and attitude components. In 4 studies, the attitude parameter is validated using existing attitudes and applied to probe for contingency-unaware evaluative conditioning. A fifth experiment incorporates a time-delay manipulation confirming the dissociability of the attitude and memory components. The results indicate that evaluative conditioning can produce attitudes without conscious awareness of the contingencies. Implications for theories of evaluative conditioning and associative learning are discussed.

Feature-Specific Attention Allocation Modulates the Generalization of Recently Acquired Likes and Dislikes

“…Although this effect was rather weak, it corroborates the claim that EC effects can be obtained in the absence of accurate valence awareness (Huetter et al, 2012).…”

Putting Operating Principles (What) Before Conditions (How and When) to Improve Theorizing: S - S versus S - R learning in Evaluative Conditioning

“…Indeed, if the EC effect is based on S -R associations, contingency memory would be revealed in awareness of the CS -US valence association, which is not captured by CS -US identity measures. Second, the valence-based measures overestimate contingency memory when people rely on their (conditioned) attitudes in answering the memory question, which interferes with the detection of contingency-unaware EC effects (Hütter, Sweldens, Stahl, Unkelbach, & Klauer, 2012). However, perhaps these measures could be more valuably used to determine whether the EC effect in a particular setup is based rather on S -S than on S -R associations.…”

How to Study Consciousness in Consumer Research, A Commentary on Williams and Poehlman

“…The relevant question is rather whether the EC effect was established without participants' awareness of the contingency between conditioned stimulus and the valence of the unconditioned stimulus at the time of learning. To this date, such demonstrations remain elusive (Hütter et al 2012;Stahl, Haaf, and Corneille 2016;Sweldens et al 2014). The point is that evidence for unawareness at one level (e.g., of one's behavioral or attitudinal response) would be evaluated very differently from evidence for unawareness at another level (e.g., of the relation between stimuli).…”

“…Objective operational definitions depend on participants utilizing their internal knowledge in performance measures (e.g., tasks that require participants to select a stimulus previously seen out of an array of stimuli). A drawback to such measures is that performance may also reflect familiarity or implicit memory (Hütter et al 2012;Jacoby 1991). A third operational definition of awareness draws on the metacognitive insight in the accuracy of the verbal report or one's performance.…”

“…Therefore parameter estimates obtained by process dissociation procedures cannot be taken at face value either, but (like other measures) need to be complemented with additional experimental manipulations. For example, parameter estimates for conscious and unconscious processes need to be validated by manipulations of variables assumed to impact these processes differently (e.g., cognitive capacity, motivation or attention; Hütter et al 2012;Hütter and Sweldens, 2016;Mierop, Hütter, and Corneille, 2016).…”