Balas, R. 1, 2 & Sweklej, J. 1
1 Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities
2 Institute of Psychology Polish Academy of Sciences
Evaluative conditioning (EC) is a process of changing the evaluation of initially neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus - CS) due to its repeated exposure with either positive or negative stimulus (unconditioned stimulus - US). There is no consensus whether EC requires subject’s awareness of CS-US contingencies as well as awareness of stimuli themselves. The presented research examines whether EC is possible without perceptual and contingency awareness. First two studies examined whether EC is possible with subliminal presentation of the stimuli. To assess contingency awareness a 4 Picture Recognition Test was used. This test requires participants to select an US that was presented together with a CS at the time of conditioning. The third study adopted dissociation logic in contingency awareness check as well as in evaluation. We asked participants to select the item that DID NOT accompany the CS or exclude the possible influence of conditioning on CS evaluations. We found EC effects independent of awareness in all studies. This suggests that affective learning might proceed with no perceptual access to the stimuli. However, we also show that intentional control over responses elicited by conditioned stimulus is to some extent possible thanks to the awareness of responses not CS-US contingencies.