Institut fur Psychologie, Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat Heidelberg, Hauptstrasse 47-51, Heidelberg, Germany.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2012 Aug;141(3):539-57. doi: 10.1037/a0026477. Epub 2011 Dec 26.
Whether human evaluative conditioning can occur without contingency awareness has been the subject of an intense and ongoing debate for decades, troubled by a wide array of methodological difficulties. Following recent methodological innovations, the available evidence currently points to the conclusion that evaluative conditioning effects do not occur without contingency awareness. In a simulation, we demonstrate, however, that these innovations are strongly biased toward the conclusion that evaluative conditioning requires contingency awareness, confounding the measurement of contingency memory with conditioned attitudes. We adopt a process-dissociation procedure to separate the memory and attitude components. In 4 studies, the attitude parameter is validated using existing attitudes and applied to probe for contingency-unaware evaluative conditioning. A fifth experiment incorporates a time-delay manipulation confirming the dissociability of the attitude and memory components. The results indicate that evaluative conditioning can produce attitudes without conscious awareness of the contingencies. Implications for theories of evaluative conditioning and associative learning are discussed.
几十年来，人类的评价条件作用是否可以在没有关联意识的情况下发生一直是一个激烈且持续的争论主题，受到了各种方法学困难的困扰。在最近的方法学创新之后，现有的证据目前指向的结论是，评价条件作用效应不会在没有关联意识的情况下发生。然而，在一项模拟研究中，我们证明了这些创新强烈偏向于评价条件作用需要关联意识的结论，将关联记忆的测量与条件作用的态度混淆在一起。我们采用过程分离程序来分离记忆和态度成分。在 4 项研究中，我们使用现有的态度来验证态度参数，并应用于探测无意识关联的评价条件作用。第五个实验纳入了时间延迟操作，确认了态度和记忆成分的可分离性。结果表明，评价条件作用可以在没有意识地意识到关联的情况下产生态度。讨论了这些结果对评价条件作用和联想学习理论的影响。
