Abstract
Stimuli associated with emotional events signal the presence of potentially relevant situations, thus learning to rapidly identify this kind of stimuli can be highly beneficial. It has been demonstrated that individuals acquire a better perceptual representation of stimuli associated with negative and threatening emotional events. Here we investigated whether the same process occurs for stimuli associated with positive and rewarding emotional events. We used an appetitive Pavlovian conditioning paradigm during which one of two perceptually non-distinguishable odors was associated with a rewarding taste (i.e., chocolate). We investigated whether appetitive conditioning could improve the recognition of the odor associated with the reward, rendering it discriminable from its similar version that was never associated with the reward. Results revealed a dissociation between explicit perception and physiological reactions. Although participants were not able to explicitly perceive a difference, they reacted faster, inhaled more and had higher skin conductance responses when confronted with the reward-associated odor compared to its similar version that was never associated with the reward. Our findings have demonstrated that positive emotional associations can improve the implicit perceptual representation of odors, by triggering different physiological responses to odors that do not seem to be otherwise distinguishable.
Highlights
Understanding how organisms deal with their limited attentional resources in an environment composed of a virtually infinite number of stimuli has always been of main interest for cognitive sciences (Posner, 1980)
We investigated whether appetitive conditioning could improve the recognition of the odor associated with the reward, rendering it discriminable from its similar version that was never associated with the reward
Participants were not able to explicitly perceive a difference, they reacted faster, inhaled more and had higher skin conductance responses when confronted with the reward-associated odor compared to its similar version that was never associated with the reward
Summary
Understanding how organisms deal with their limited attentional resources in an environment composed of a virtually infinite number of stimuli has always been of main interest for cognitive sciences (Posner, 1980). A large amount of evidence has shown that emotional stimuli are difficult to ignore (e.g., Segerstrom, 2001; Compton et al, 2003); that our gaze is rapidly oriented toward them (e.g., Nummenmaa et al, 2009; Theeuwes and Belopolsky, 2012); that disengaging attention from them is hard (e.g., Fox et al, 2001; Yiend and Mathews, 2001; di Pellegrino et al, 2011); and that in a complex environment with competing stimuli, they have a prioritized access to attentional resources (e.g., Ohman et al, 2001; Anderson, 2005; Hodsoll et al, 2011) These effects of emotional stimuli on cognitive processing have been shown to be at least mediated by an enhancement of the neuronal activity linked to sensorial processing. The activity linked to sensory processing at very early stages is amplified during the processing of emotional stimuli, as demonstrated with electroencephalography, (e.g., Pourtois et al, 2004; Brosch et al, 2008; Hickey et al, 2010) and functional imagery (e.g., Vuilleumier et al, 2001; Grandjean et al, 2005; Mohanty et al, 2008)
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