Dissociating the effects of attention and contingency awareness on evaluative conditioning effects in the visual paradigm

Abstract

Two experiments are described that investigate the effects of attention in moderating evaluative conditioning (EC) effects in a picture‐picture paradigm in which previously discovered experimental artifacts (e.g., Field & Davey, 1999) were overcome by counterbalancing conditioned stimuli (CSs) and unconditioned stimuli (USs) across participants. Conditioned responses for individuals who had attention enhanced were compared against a control group and groups for whom attention was impeded using a distracter task. In a second experiment the effects of attention were dissociated from those of contingency awareness by using backward‐masked US presentations. The results of these experiments indicate that although associative EC effects may not be disrupted by a lack of contingency awareness, attention is an important factor in establishing conditioning. These results shed some light onto the possible boundary conditions that could explain past inconsistencies in obtaining EC effects in the visual paradigm.

Notes

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Andy P. Field, Department of Psychology, School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, East Sussex, BN1 9QH, e‐mail: [email protected]

This research was funded by Unilever pic, Grant RBW3 0600 to Andy Field. The authors are grateful to Bob Boakes for his suggestions regarding Experiment 2, and to Leonora Wilkinson for invaluable discussions when revising the paper.

Some studies in the visual domain have used random CS‐UC allocations (e.g., De Houwer et al., 2000), which reduces the possibility of artefacts, but fully counterbalancing eliminates any remote possibility that effects are stimulus‐specific.