Unconscious conditioning: Demonstration of existence and difference from conscious conditioning.

Abstract

Unpronounceable strings of 4 consonants (conditioned stimuli: CSs) were consistently followed by familiar words belonging to one of two opposed semantic categories (unconditioned stimuli: USs). Conditioning, in the form of greater accuracy in rapidly classifying USs into their categories, was found when visually imperceptible (to most subjects) CSs occupied ≥ 58 ms of a 75-ms CS–US interval. When clearly visible CSs were presented in a 375 ms CS–US interval, conditioning was strongly correlated with measures of contingency awareness, and did not occur in the absence of that awareness. These experiments delineated two forms of conditioning: Unconscious conditioning occurred with a brief CS–US interval, with an effectively masked CS, and with no reportable knowledge of the contingent CS–US relation. Conscious conditioning occurred with a substantially longer CS–US interval, a perceptible CS, and with subjects’ reportable knowledge of the contingent CS–US relation.

No evaluative conditioning effects with briefly presented stimuli

“…In addition, it would be interesting to test whether EC effects with briefly presented and masked CSs follow other regularities than EC effects with clearly visible CSs. This was recently suggested by Greenwald and De Houwer (2017), who report learning effects for suboptimally presented CS stimuli for which contingency awareness was not present. Notably, a learning effect in the absence of contingency awareness was found only when stimuli were not (or barely) identifiable.…”

Associative Attitude Learning: A Closer Look at Evidence and How It Relates to Attitude Models

“…Another recent study that used indirect measures to address subliminal conditioning avoided this problem by masking the CSs (Greenwald & De Houwer, 2017). In a series of experiments, participants had to learn to quickly press one of two response keys to classify target words as either positive or negative.…”

Evaluative Conditioning as Memory-Based Judgment

“…In principle, however, the ability of MINERVA 2 to account for a wide range of EC phenomena does not exclude the possibility that two qualitatively different memory systems-a declarative and a non-declarative one-underlie (some of these) EC effects. For instance, one may speculate that (unconscious) learning processes in performance tasks such as those reported by Greenwald and De Houwer (2017) may be based on nondeclarative memory, whereas effects on evaluative ratings in similar paradigms (Schmidt & De Houwer, 2012) may turn out to depend on declarative memory. While it appears that the response priming effect in Greenwald and De Houwer (2017) reflects nondeclarative processes, it remains unclear whether it should be interpreted as EC, which will arguably depend on the degree to which the nondeclarative learning effect turns out to be directly relevant for evaluative cognitions and behaviors.…”

“…The above discussion of current memory theory highlights two additional predictions that can be derived from the single-process memory model: First, nondeclarative learning effects (e.g., Greenwald & De Houwer, 2017) may be obtained simultaneously and in parallel with effects driven by declarative memory. Importantly, nondeclarative learning effects should not directly inform evaluative cognitions and behaviors.…”