Arunkumar Mrudula, Rothermund Klaus, Giesen Carina G
Department of General Psychology II, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany.
Department of Psychology, Health and Medical University Erfurt, Germany.
Exp Psychol. 2024 Jan 30;70(5):259-70. doi: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000597.
A conditioned response to a stimulus can be transferred to an associated stimulus, as seen in sensory preconditioning. In this research paper, we aimed to explore this phenomenon using a stimulus-response contingency learning paradigm using voluntary actions as responses. We conducted two preregistered experiments that explored whether a learned response can be indirectly activated by a stimulus (S1) that was never directly paired with the response itself. Importantly, S1 was previously associated with another stimulus (S2) that was then directly and contingently paired with a response (S2-R contingency). In Experiment 1a, an indirect activation of acquired stimulus-response contingencies was present for audiovisual stimulus pairs wherein the stimulus association resembled a vocabulary learning setup. This result was replicated in Experiment 1b. Additionally, we found that the effect is moderated by having conscious awareness of the S1-S2 association and the S2-R contingency. By demonstrating indirect activation effects for voluntary actions, our findings show that principles of Pavlovian conditioning like sensory preconditioning also apply to contingency learning of stimulus-response relations for operant behavior.
对一种刺激的条件反应可以转移到相关联的刺激上，如在感觉预条件作用中所见。在本研究论文中，我们旨在使用以自主行为作为反应的刺激-反应偶联学习范式来探究这一现象。我们进行了两项预先注册的实验，探究一种习得反应是否能被一个从未与该反应本身直接配对的刺激（S1）间接激活。重要的是，S1先前与另一个刺激（S2）相关联，然后该刺激与一种反应直接且偶联配对（S2-R偶联）。在实验1a中，对于视听刺激对存在习得的刺激-反应偶联的间接激活，其中刺激关联类似于词汇学习设置。该结果在实验1b中得到重复。此外，我们发现这种效应受到对S1-S2关联和S2-R偶联的有意识觉知的调节。通过展示自主行为的间接激活效应，我们的研究结果表明，像感觉预条件作用这样的经典条件作用原理也适用于操作性行为的刺激-反应关系的偶联学习。
