Potentiation of the startle reflex is in line with contingency reversal instructions rather than the conditioning history

Rapid Top-Down Control of Behavior Due to Propositional Knowledge in Human Associative Learning

“…Moreover, this is an important and novel result. To our understanding, there is an important difference between previous studies based on IAT (e.g., [26–28]) or potentiated startle responses (e.g., [29, 30]) and the results reported here. Whilst these previous demonstrations of the operation of propositional knowledge in performance were detected without effortful control on behalf of the participants, our participants were instructed to use the verbal information provided in order to adapt to the new contingencies.…”

“…Secondly, in both studies, these instruction-based rapid responses could actually override pre-existing experience-based S-R mappings. Thus, both our results and those of [29, 30] may be regarded as providing convergent evidence for a rapid control of behavior due to instructions, even when previous experience-based S-R mappings had to be overruled.…”

“…Thus, our experimental procedure may be regarded as a more stringent test for revealing a fast activation of propositional knowledge. Even more compelling are the results reported by Mertens and colleagues [29, 30] using a fear-conditioning paradigm. In their studies, participants first learned that certain conditioned stimuli were associated with shocks, while others were safe.…”

The contextual malleability of approach-avoidance training effects: approaching or avoiding fear conditioned stimuli modulates effects of approach-avoidance training

“…The intensity of the electric shock was determined individually for each participant to be 'highly unpleasant but not painful' using a shock work-up procedure. For reasons of brevity we refer readers to Mertens and De Houwer (2016) for the details regarding this procedure.…”

Learned desires

“…Studies have shown that contingency instructions can have a big impact on responding as well. For example, verbal instructions about the CS-US contingency (e.g., that the CS+ predicts a shock) can establish conditioned fear responses in the absence of actual CS-US pairings (e.g., Raes, De Houwer, De Schryver, Brass, & Kalisch, 2014), and information suggesting a reversal of CS-US contingencies after conditioning (e.g., informing participants that the CS+ is no longer followed by a shock) can reverse fear responses (e.g., Mertens & De Houwer, 2016). In many conditioning studies, contingency instructions are provided prior to acquisition, guiding a participant's attention towards the CS-US relationship (e.g., "one of these boxes will sometimes contain something to eat, whereas the other box will never contain anything").…”