Abstract
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.
Highlights
There is a long-standing debate whether fear learning can occur without awareness of the relationship between the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the unconditioned stimulus (US)
The aim of the present study was to investigate whether startle and skin conductance response (SCR) conditioning correspond with contingency awareness
The main finding was that startle conditioning can occur independent of contingency awareness
Summary
There is a long-standing debate whether fear learning can occur without awareness of the relationship between the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the unconditioned stimulus (US). Other studies showed that SCR conditioning can only be observed in parallel with the conscious expectancy of the CS to be followed by the US (Dawson and Biferno, 1973; Dawson and Furedy, 1976; Hamm and Vaitl, 1996; Purkis and Lipp, 2001; Lovibond and Shanks, 2002; Hamm and Weike, 2005; Weike et al, 2007). In addition to the studies that show that SCR conditioning requires contingency learning (Dawson and Biferno, 1973; Dawson and Furedy, 1976; Hamm and Vaitl, 1996; Purkis and Lipp, 2001; Lovibond and Shanks, 2002; Hamm and Weike, 2005; Weike et al, 2005, 2007), both pharmacological and cognitive manipulations revealed that SCR is strongly related to expectancy learning
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