Affective-Evaluative Learning in Humans: A Form of Associative Learning or Only an Artifact?

Contingency Awareness and Evaluative Conditioning: When Will It Be Enough?

“…In fact, forced-choice performance in the awareness reduction group was significantly below chance. This suggests that the participants in that group did have some conscious knowledge of the CS-US contingencies (also see Lovibond & Shanks, in press, who made the same comment with regard to the study of Hammerl & Grabitz, 2000). Fulcher (personal communication, July 11, 2001), however, clarified that participants had the option not to answer the last awareness question.…”

When All Is Considered: Evaluative Learning Does Not Require Contingency Awareness

“…However, while there is a very small chance of a systematic bias in any EL experiment, that they should have consistently occurred across dozens of published experiments is statistically unlikely. Moreover, EL has been demonstrated in studies that used a BSB control (e.g., Hammerl & Grabitz, 2000;Díaz, Baeyens, Ruiz, & Sánchez, 2000), and therefore, this explanation for EL has been ruled out. In this context, Field argued in his commentary that a single demonstration of EL in a between-subjects design is not sufficient and that omitting the BSB control in further studies is like suggesting stopping the use of placebo controls in clinical pharmacological studies.…”

When All Is Still Concealed: Are We Closer to Understanding the Mechanisms Underlying Evaluative Conditioning?

“…Fulcher and Hammerl's experiments have no such control because they argue, ' 'Hammerl and Grabitz (2000) show that evaluative learning is also demonstrable in a between-subjects design and that the standard within-subjects control conditions (i.e. N-N stimulus pairs) are an appropriate way to control nonassociative influences.''…”