Flavor-evaluative conditioning is unaffected by contingency knowledge during training with color-flavor compounds

Abstract

In two experiments, participants inspected and drank a series of drinks, half of which contained sugarand half unpalatable Tween20 (tween). Each sugar and tween drink had a particular flavor and color. Following this training, the flavors of the sugar drinks were assigned higher hedonicevaluations than were those of thetween drinks, even though the participants did not reliably report which flavors had been present in the sugar and tween drinks during training. Moreover, the evaluative conditioning of the flavors was unaffected by whether or not the colors alone had been pretrained to predict the presence of sugar or tween in the drinks. In accord with Baeyens, Eelen, van den Bergh, and Crombez (1990), we conclude that flavor-evaluative conditioning is not mediated by contingency learning.