Abstract
Evaluative conditioning (EC) changes the preference towards a formerly neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus; CS), by pairing it with a valent stimulus (unconditioned stimulus; US), in the direction of the valence of the US. When the CS is presented suboptimally (i.e., too briefly to be consciously perceived), contingency awareness between CS and US can be ruled out. Hence, EC effects with suboptimally presented CSs would support theories claiming that contingency awareness is not necessary for EC effects to occur. Recent studies reported the absence of EC with briefly presented CSs when both CS and US were presented in the visual modality, even though the CSs were identified at above-chance levels. Challenging this finding, Heycke et al. (R Soc Open Sci 4(9):160935, 2017) found some evidence for an EC effect with briefly presented visual stimuli in a cross-modal paradigm with auditory USs, but that study did not assess CS visibility. The present study realized a close replication of this study, while deviated from it using different stimuli, introducing a brief practice phase, and adding a CS visibility check. Overall EC for briefly presented stimuli was absent, and results from the visibility check show that an EC effect with briefly presented CSs was only found, when the CSs were identified at above-chance levels.
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Notes
Note that, in these studies, CS presentation was not fully subliminal: Although CS identification performance was very low, it was significantly above chance levels, thereby ruling out the alternative explanation that the CSs have not been processed at all.
The data of the pretest and the main study were collected under a Born Open Data protocol (Rouder, 2016) in which they were automatically logged, uploaded, and made freely available after every day of data collection (https://github.com/methexp/rawdata/tree/master/croco4, https://github.com/methexp/rawdata/tree/master/croco4b, https://github.com/methexp/rawdata/tree/master/croco5).
As we had two stimuli per experimental cell (e.g., two different CSs for briefly presented stimuli paired with a positive US), we had at least one rating per US valence in the 30 ms condition for 143 participants when applying the exclusion criterion.
We additionally tested whether these 18 participants, who showed a better visibility for the 30 ms stimuli, also showed a larger EC effect for stimuli presented for 1000 ms than all other participants. There were no indications that this was the case, \({\mathrm{BF}}_{01}(152) = 1.65\), \(d = 0.30\), 95% HDI [− 0.16, 0.77].
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Acknowledgements
Tobias Heycke and Christoph Stahl planned and conducted the experiment, analyzed the data, and wrote the article. The study was funded by a grant awarded to Tobias Heycke by the Graduate School of the Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Cologne, and by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Grant 1269/3-1 awarded to Christoph Stahl. The data presented here is part of the dissertation of Tobias Heycke. We thank N. Becker, K. Mattonet, L. Moerschbacher, P. Musfeld, and L. Spitzer for their help with the data collection of the pilot studies and the experiment and J. Berkessel for her help with the data collection of the online pilot study. Additional material, data files, and analysis scripts are provided at osf.io/3dn7e/.
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The present research used procedures that are exempt from mandatory formal ethical approval under the ethical guidelines of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie. We asked for an informed consent by each participant and instructed them about their rights before the start of the experiment (e.g., right to abort at any moment, be informed about study goals, and anonymity of data).
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Heycke, T., Stahl, C. No evaluative conditioning effects with briefly presented stimuli. Psychological Research 84, 1020–1027 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1109-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1109-1