Ignorance reflects preference: the influence of selective ignoring on evaluative conditioning

ABSTRACT

In the current experiment, we investigated the mechanism underlying the modulation of evaluative conditioning (EC) due to selective attention. Conditioned stimulus–unconditioned stimulus (CS–US) pairs were presented in a just recently introduced adapted Flanker paradigm [Blask, K., Walther, E., & Frings, C. (2016). When congruence breeds preference: The influence of selective attention processes on evaluative conditioning. Cognition and Emotion. doi:10.1080/02699931.2016.1197100] with CSs as targets and USs as task-irrelevant distracters. In order to disentangle stimulus congruency and response compatibility and in order to observe a possible impact of response compatibility, EC in an incongruent/incompatible condition was compared to EC in an incongruent/neutral condition. Results show that EC and contingency memorywere significantly reduced in the incongruent/incompatible condition relative to the incongruent/neutral condition. These findings support the notion that the modulation of EC due to selective attention can be based on the selective ignoring of the US at the level of response compatibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Evaluative conditioning
• selective ignoring
• congruency/compatibility
• contingency memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Due to sphericity violations in this analysis, we provide Greenhouse–Geisser corrected degrees of freedom for the congruency/compatibility effect.

2 Given that contingency memory within the different congruency/compatibility conditions was not further modulated by either US-valence or US-arousal (all Fs < 2.51, all ps > .085) contingency memory data were collapsed across the two variables. If anything the congruency/compatibility effect was somewhat more pronounced for positively paired CSs (F(1, 61) = 5.80, p = .019,  = 0.09) as compared to the negatively paired CSs (F(1, 61) = 2.86, p = .096,  = 0.05).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under Grant WA 1344/9-1 and Grant FR 2133/10-1 to Eva Walther and Christian Frings.