Evaluative conditioning (EC) is one of the most widely-studied procedures for establishing and changing attitudes. The surveillance-task (Olson & Fazio, 2001) is a highly cited EC paradigm, and one that is claimed to generate attitudes without awareness. The potential for EC effects to occur without awareness continues to fuel conceptual, theoretical, and applied developments. Yet few published studies have used this task, and most are characterized by small samples and small effect sizes. We conducted a high-powered (N =1478), preregistered close replication of the original surveillance-task study. We obtained evidence for a small EC effect when ‘aware’ participants were excluded using the original criterion – therefore replicating the original effect. However, no such effect emerged when three other awareness criteria were used. We suggest that there is a need for caution when using evidence for the surveillance task effect to make theoretical and practical claims about ‘unaware’ EC effects.

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Evaluative conditioning is one of the most widely studied procedures for establishing and changing attitudes. The surveillance task is a highly cited evaluative-conditioning paradigm and one that is claimed to generate attitudes without awareness. The potential for evaluative-conditioning effects to occur without awareness continues to fuel conceptual, theoretical, and applied developments. Yet few published studies have used this task, and most are characterized by small samples and small effect sizes. We conducted a high-powered ( N = 1,478 adult participants), preregistered close replication of the original surveillance-task study (Olson & Fazio, 2001). We obtained evidence for a small evaluative-conditioning effect when “aware” participants were excluded using the original criterion—therefore replicating the original effect. However, no such effect emerged when three other awareness criteria were used. We suggest that there is a need for caution when using evidence from the surveillance-task effect to make theoretical and practical claims about “unaware” evaluative-conditioning effects.

The evaluative conditioning (EC) phenomenon is central to the study of preference acquisition and attitude formation. Early studies have reported EC in the absence of awareness, but more recent work has questioned this conclusion. In previous work, using briefly presented and pattern-masked conditioned stimuli (CSs), we found that above-chance forced-choice identification of CSs is necessary for EC. Here we extend this work by addressing more directly the inherently subjective issue of consciousness. In 2 studies, we assessed whether above-threshold perceptual awareness of CSs is necessary for EC. Contrasting unconscious learning claims, EC was absent under low and intermediate levels of perceptual awareness. Additional findings suggest that the perceptual awareness task does not interfere with EC, and that it is more sensitive than memory-based awareness proxies. We also found that a confounded variant of the forced-choice identification task can artifactually induce EC; and that an unconfounded version of the task does not induce nor interfere with EC. We discuss limitations of the present studies as well as their relevance for the debate about the automaticity of evaluative learning.