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Although doctors know the importance of obtaining an accurate medication history and checking prescriptions with patients, they often fail to put this into practice, resulting in prescribing errors.

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Two experiments investigated the temporal relationship between performance gains and awareness. College students were reinforced for pronoun responses in a sentence-construction task or for human noun responses in a word-naming task. Awareness was assessed from notes written by 5s during the conditioning task and from a postconditioning questionnaire. Of unaware 5s, only those reinforced for pronoun responses showed a conditioning effect. In both experiments, aware 5s demonstrated performance gains prior to reports of awareness, although the effect was more pronounced in the sentence-construction task. The results were interpreted as supporting a behavioral explanation of verbal conditioning that performance gains and awareness are both dependent variables which can be influenced directly by reinforcement or indirectly by other factors such as nature of the task. It was also concluded that unless awareness is assessed frequently during conditioning, performance gains occurring prior to awareness may not be detected, leading to erroneous conclusions about the role of awareness in verbal conditioning.

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