TY - JOUR PY - 2016// TI - When congruence breeds preference: the influence of selective attention processes on evaluative conditioning JO - Cognition and emotion A1 - Blask, Katarina A1 - Walther, Eva A1 - Frings, Christian SP - 1127 EP - 1139 VL - 31 IS - 6 N2 - We investigated in two experiments whether selective attention processes modulate evaluative conditioning (EC). Based on the fact that the typical stimuli in an EC paradigm involve an affect-laden unconditioned stimulus (US) and a neutral conditioned stimulus (CS), we started from the assumption that learning might depend in part upon selective attention to the US. Attention to the US was manipulated by including a variant of the Eriksen flanker task in the EC paradigm. Similarly to the original Flanker paradigm, we implemented a target-distracter logic by introducing the CS as the task-relevant stimulus (i.e. the target) to which the participants had to respond and the US as a task-irrelevant distracter. Experiment 1 showed that CS-US congruence modulated EC if the CS had to be selected against the US. Specifically, EC was more pronounced for congruent CS-US pairs as compared to incongruent CS-US pairs. Experiment 2 disentangled CS-US congruence and CS-US compatibility and suggested that it is indeed CS-US stimulus congruence rather than CS-US response compatibility that modulates EC.
Language: en
LA - en SN - 0269-9931 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2016.1197100 ID - ref1 ER -