Sevenster Dieuwke, Beckers Tom, Kindt Merel
Department of Clinical Psychology, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Netherlands ; Amsterdam Brain and Cognition, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Department of Clinical Psychology, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Netherlands ; Amsterdam Brain and Cognition, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Netherlands ; Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Department of Psychology, University of Leuven Leuven, Belgium.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2014 Feb 28;8:32. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00032. eCollection 2014.
There is conflicting evidence as to whether awareness is required for conditioning of the skin conductance response (SCR). Recently, Schultz and Helmstetter (2010) reported SCR conditioning in contingency unaware participants by using difficult to discriminate stimuli. These findings are in stark contrast with other observations in human fear conditioning research, showing that SCR predominantly reflects contingency learning. Therefore, we repeated the study by Schultz and Helmstetter and additionally measured conditioning of the startle response, which seems to be less sensitive to declarative knowledge than SCR. While we solely observed SCR conditioning in participants who reported awareness of the contingencies (n = 16) and not in the unaware participants (n = 18), we observed startle conditioning irrespective of awareness. We conclude that SCR but not startle conditioning depends on conscious discriminative fear learning.
关于皮肤电传导反应（SCR）的条件作用是否需要意识存在相互矛盾的证据。最近，舒尔茨和赫尔姆斯泰特（2010年）报告称，通过使用难以区分的刺激，在意外情况不知情的参与者中实现了SCR条件作用。这些发现与人类恐惧条件作用研究中的其他观察结果形成鲜明对比，后者表明SCR主要反映意外情况学习。因此，我们重复了舒尔茨和赫尔姆斯泰特的研究，并额外测量了惊吓反应的条件作用，惊吓反应似乎比SCR对陈述性知识的敏感性更低。虽然我们仅在报告知晓意外情况的参与者（n = 16）中观察到了SCR条件作用，而在不知情的参与者（n = 18）中未观察到，但无论是否有意识，我们都观察到了惊吓条件作用。我们得出结论，SCR条件作用而非惊吓条件作用依赖于有意识的辨别性恐惧学习。
