ABSTRACTEvaluative conditioning procedures change people’s evaluations of stimuli that are paired with pleasant or unpleasant items. To test whether influence awareness allows people to resist such...

ABSTRACTResearch that dissociates different types of processes within a given task using a processing tree approach suggests that attitudes may be acquired through evaluative conditioning in the absence of explicit encoding of CS-US pairings in memory. This research distinguishes explicit memory for the CS-US pairings from CS-liking acquired without encoding of CS-US pairs in explicit memory. It has been suggested that the latter effect may be due to an implicit misattribution process that is assumed to operate when US evocativeness is (...) low. In the present research, the latter assumption was supported neither by two high-powered experiments nor by complementary meta-analytic evidence, whereas evocativeness exerted an influence on explicit memory. This pattern of findings is inconsistent with the view that CS-liking acquired without encoding of CS-US pairs in explicit memory reflects an implicit misattribution process at learning. Hence, the underlying learning process is awaiting further empirical scrutiny. (shrink)

We investigated in two experiments whether selective attention processes modulate evaluative conditioning. Based on the fact that the typical stimuli in an EC paradigm involve an affect-laden unconditioned stimulus and a neutral conditioned stimulus, we started from the assumption that learning might depend in part upon selective attention to the US. Attention to the US was manipulated by including a variant of the Eriksen flanker task in the EC paradigm. Similarly to the original Flanker paradigm, we implemented a target-distracter logic (...) by introducing the CS as the task-relevant stimulus to which the participants had to respond and the US as a task-irrelevant distracter. Experiment 1 showed that CS–US congruence modulated EC if the CS had to be selected against the US. Specifically, EC was more pronounced for congruent CS–US pairs as compared to incongruent CS–US pairs. Experiment 2 disentangled CS–US congruence and CS–US compatibility and suggested that it is indeed CS–US stimulus congruence rather than CS–US response compatibility that modulates EC. (shrink)