Effects of conditioned stimulus preexposure on human electrodermal conditioning

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the effects of conditioned stimulus (CS) preexposure on Pavlovian differential conditioning and extinction of the skin conductance response. In both experiments, half the subjects were exposed to 20 presentations each of the CS+ and CS-, and the other half were exposed to control stimuli. CS duration was 8 sec. The unconditioned stimulus in Experiment 1 ( N= 48) was a 1000 Hz tone of 80 dB which signalled a reaction time requirement, and in Experiment 2 ( N = 48), it was a 1 sec burst of white noise at 105 dB. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that no-preexposure groups displayed more CS+ /CS- differentiation than preexposure groups during acquisition and more resistance to extinction, at least for the first interval anticipatory response. In addition, the results of Experiment 2 indicated that no-preexposure groups displayed more differentiation than preexposure groups in terms of the second interval anticipatory response. These data constitute a demonstration of the latent inhibition effect with human subjects, and imply that there is an intrinsic relationship between the orienting response and the conditioning process.