Distinguishing the role of conscious and unconscious knowledge in evaluative conditioning

Abstract

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to a change in liking of a conditioned stimulus (CS) subsequent to its repeated pairing with a valent stimulus (US). Two studies that bring new light on the highly debated question of the role of awareness in EC were conducted. We developed an innovative method motivated by higher order and integration theories of consciousness to distinguish between the role of conscious and unconscious knowledge about the pairings. On each trial of the awareness test, participants had to indicate the valence of the US associated with a given CS and to make a 'structural knowledge attribution' by reporting the basis of their response. Valence identification accuracy was used to evaluate knowledge while the knowledge attribution was used to measure the conscious status of knowledge. Memory attribution indicated conscious knowledge about the pairings while feeling-based and random attributions indicated unconscious knowledge. A meta-analysis of the two studies revealed that valence identification accuracy was above chance level for memory and feelingbased attributions but not for the random attribution. EC was found in the three attributions. While EC effect size was medium for the memory attribution it was small for feeling-based and random attributions. Moreover, Experiment 2 included a delayed test. EC was still present 24 hours after the conditioning took place. The results obtained for memory and feeling-based attributions suggest that both conscious and unconscious knowledge may underlie EC. The results obtained for random attribution suggest that EC may also occur without any knowledge of US valence.

A conditional judgment procedure for probing evaluative conditioning effects in the absence of feelings of remembering

“…valence-memory responses (Stahl et al, 2009). Also replicating previous findings (Waroquier et al, 2020), an EC effect was found for the lowest levels of subjective memory (e.g., low-confidence/Guess responses), although its interpretation is complicated by selection-bias issues. When considered jointly, EC was found to increase with subjective memory only for accurate valence-memory responses.…”

“…While our interpretation should be considered provisional and open to debate, the pattern itself is clearly reliable. It is consistent not only across the present studies and with our own previous work, but also with novel independent data: The publicly available data from Waroquier et al (2020) allowed us to probe for a comparable pattern in their Experiment 1; the above interaction pattern replicated.…”

Unconscious Knowledge of Rewards Guides Instrumental Behaviors via Conscious Judgments

“…However, typically in these experiments, some participants are aware of (parts of) the regularity, hence some conscious participants or conscious trials need to be excluded. This approach has been employed less often in instrumental conditioning (e.g., Bechara et al, 1997; but see Maia & McClelland, 2004), but has been extensively used in other fields of research on unconscious learning processes, such as evaluative conditioning (e.g., Olson & Fazio, 2001;Jurchis et al, 2020;Waroquier et al, 2020), Pavlovian conditioning (Leganes-Fonteneau et al 2018, visuo-motor sequence learning (e.g., Kobor et al, 2017;Fu et al, 2012) or learning of artificial grammars (e.g., Reber, 1967, in press;Norman et al, 2019). The artificial grammar learning task (AGL) has been one of the most often employed experimental paradigms for investigations on implicit learning.…”

“…Their task is now to select the string that is the most likely to bring rewards (i.e., the string from the rewarded grammar). Using an awareness measure widely employed in implicit learning and conditioning (e.g., Dienes & Scott, 2005;Norman et al, 2019;Waroquier et al, 2020), we assess the conscious/unconscious status of their structural knowledge, that is, knowledge of which are the structural elements (i.e. the features of the grammars) associated with rewards.…”

“…First, since any awareness measure presupposes a subjacent theory, we used a measure of awareness grounded in the dominant theories of consciousness (Dienes, 2012;Dienes & Scott, 2005;Jurchis et al, 2020;Waroquier et al, 2020). The higher-order thoughts theory of consciousness is built on the principle that, for being aware of an information, one needs to have a meta-representation of having that information; that is, one needs to know that one knows the information (Rosenthal, 2004;Dienes, 2012) and, consequently, one should be able to report the information.…”