Beyond evaluative conditioning? Searching for associative transfer of nonevaluative stimulus properties

Unconscious transfer of meaning to brands

“…In an advertising context, Kim et al (1996) showed that repeatedly pairing a brand of pizza delivery (“L Pizza House”) with a picture of a race car increased the perception of L Pizza House as being “fast.” The issue of the role of conscious vs. unconscious psychological processes was discussed in the latter two papers, but their investigation was not the main purpose of either piece of research. To the extent the data in both studies speak to the issue of conscious vs. unconscious processes, in Meersmans et al's (2005) experiments, evidence of semantic conditioning was found only when participants were aware that the gender neutral infant pictures had been paired with the clearly identifiable male or female infant pictures. Similarly, Kim et al (1996) found that only participants who were aware of the L Pizza House–race car pairing acquired the belief that L Pizza House was speedy and developed more positive attitudes.…”

“…It includes early work by Staats, Staats, and Heard (1961) and more recent work as well. Meersmans et al (2005) found that predictions of the gender of infants whose gender was not apparent from a picture were affected by repeatedly pairing the infant photos with pictures of clearly identifiable male or female infants. In an advertising context, Kim et al (1996) showed that repeatedly pairing a brand of pizza delivery (“L Pizza House”) with a picture of a race car increased the perception of L Pizza House as being “fast.” The issue of the role of conscious vs. unconscious psychological processes was discussed in the latter two papers, but their investigation was not the main purpose of either piece of research.…”

“…Some research has used conditioning procedures to study the transfer of semantic meaning, but with few exceptions (e.g., Olson et al, 2009), this research focused more on finding evidence of semantic conditioning than on underlying processes. There has been discussion of the role played by conscious vs. unconscious processes (e.g., Kim, Allen, & Kardes, 1996; Meersmans, De Houwer, Baeyens, Randell, & Eelen, 2005; Olson et al, 2009), and it is this discussion that motivated the use of a subliminal procedure in our research. As indicated, we use it to unequivocally test whether semantic conditioning can occur unconsciously, given that, as will be seen next in our review of the existing literature most relevant to our research, evidence of this, to date, is equivocal.…”

“…11Prior research has also used other terms to refer to the same phenomenon, for example, conditioning of denotative meaning (Staats, Staats, & Heard 1961) associative transfer of non‐evaluative stimulus properties (Meersmans et al, 2005), and associative learning of non‐evaluative covariations (Olson, Kendrick, & Fazio 2009). …”

Evaluative Conditioning

“…For instance, Meersman, De Houwer, Baeyens, Randell, and Eelen (2005) paired images of gender-ambiguous infants (or Japanese names) with clearly gendered infants (or English names), and saw no evidence of transfer of gender among participants who were unaware of the contingencies. Similarly, using our own paradigm we saw no evidence of covariation learning when one of our usual CS was consistently paired with large/fast stimuli and the other with small/slow stimuli (Experiment 1a/b; Olson, Kendrick, & Fazio, 2009).…”