The Role of Contingency Awareness in Affective Conditioning

Abstract

Using the classical conditioning paradigm, we investigated the necessity of the conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus (CS-US) contingency awareness for affective conditioning. An aversive sound stimulus was used as US, and sine wave gratings that varied in terms of the perceptual discriminability (high, low, control) were used as CS. The voluntary attention toward US (high, low) was also manipulated as between-subject condition. After the conditioning phase, the association between CS and US can be measured as the size of priming effect. Word evaluation task based on valence was used in Experiment 1, and lexical decision task was used in Experiment 2. When participants paid attention towards US, conditioned response was observed regardless of the CS discriminability. However, when subjects tried to ignore the US, conditioning occurred only if CS+ and CS- can be easily distinguished. The result provides support for dual-process model of conditioning.