The impact of evaluative conditioning on early sensory processing

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Florian Kattner
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2018 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 399243066

Affective attitudes can be defined as learned behavioral dispositions that bias positive or negative responses toward an object. Such affective categorizations (pleasant/unpleasant, good/bad) can easily be changed (e.g., through conditioning), allowing the individual to adaptively interact with instable circumstances that are encountered in the environment. Evaluative conditioning refers to a change of the liking of a stimulus as a result of presenting it in close temporal or spatial proximity with an stimulus of either positive or negative valence. Although it was assumed that these changes in stimulus evaluations can occur even in the absence of awareness or attention, there is a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that, in most cases, evaluative conditioning required conscious recollection of the stimulus pairings. As these results are particularly relevant to the debate of propositional processes in associative learning, recent research on evaluative conditioning focused (almost exclusively) onthe cognitive prerequisites of evaluative conditioning. This came along with a neglect of the impact of these learned evaluations on perceptual and cognitive information rocessing. Interestingly, attentional theories of associative learning typically assume areciprocal relationship between learning and attention: On the one hand, attentional resources are required for learning, and on the other hand, learning about a stimulus is supposed to influence the amount of attention that is directed to the stimulus. Studies on contingency learning found that longer gaze dwell times and faster detectionthresholds for stimuli that were learned to be predictive of a certain outcome in a previous learning task. In this project, I aim to investigate to what extent evaluative conditioning modulates parameters of early senory processing, visual attention andpreattentive perception. As propositional models assume affective and cognitive associative learning to be based on a common learning mechanism, effects on early sensory processing would be expected in particular for propositional evaluative conditioning. In contrast, reduced sensory effects may be expected in the absence of cognitive resources during conditioning (i.e., when the evaluative change is based on non-propositional learning processes). A perceptual-motor account of evaluative conditioning assuming the valence shift to be the result of peripheral associations between sensory and motor signals is to be developed.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants