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Abstract
Preferences profoundly influence decision-making and are often acquired through experience, yet it is unclear what role conscious awareness plays in the formation and persistence of long-term preferences and to what extent they can be altered by new experiences. We paired visually masked cues with monetary gains or losses during a decision-making task. Despite being unaware of the cues, subjects were influenced by their predictive values over successive trials of the task, and also revealed a strong preference for the appetitive over the aversive cues in supraliminal choices made days after learning. Moreover, the preferences were resistant to an intervening procedure designed to abolish them by a change in reinforcement contingencies, revealing a surprising resilience once formed. Despite their power however, the preferences were abolished when this procedure took place shortly after reactivating the memories, indicating that the underlying affective associations undergo reconsolidation. These findings highlight the importance of initial experiences in the formation of long-lasting preferences even in the absence of consciousness, while suggesting a way to overcome them in spite of their resiliency.
Highlights
Humans and animals can learn to predict future reinforcement and make appropriate responses based upon knowledge of its contingency with environmental cues and actions
Having established acquisition of instrumental conditioning on day 1, we examined the persistence of the stimulus-outcome associations that would have presumably been formed during acquisition (Rescorla and Solomon, 1967; Mackintosh, 1983), and the efficacy of the contingency change in phase 2 learning in altering these associations, by assessing the conscious hedonic evaluation of stimuli
The acquisition of likes and dislikes is sometimes referred to as evaluative conditioning (EC) (Rozin et al, 1998; De Houwer et al, 2001; Hofmann et al, 2010), the paradigm used here differs from typical EC procedures
Summary
Humans and animals can learn to predict future reinforcement and make appropriate responses based upon knowledge of its contingency with environmental cues and actions. Experimental analysis has demonstrated that in associative learning paradigms contingent CS-US (conditioned stimulus—unconditioned stimulus) pairings (observational or via instrumental responses) have the potential to create multiple associative representations in the brain (Mackintosh, 1983; Cardinal et al, 2002; Dickinson and Balleine, 2002) Some of these associations enable stimuli to become imbued with the affective and motivational properties of the reinforcers they predict, and go on to independently influence intentional action and goal-directed behavior in a number of powerful ways (Cardinal et al, 2002; Dickinson and Balleine, 2002; Everitt et al, 2003; Berridge, 2004; Everitt and Robbins, 2005; Berridge and Aldridge, 2009). A convincing account of this learning necessitates the elimination of the declarative component, but whether preferences can be acquired by humans, without conscious awareness and persist over time is currently unknown (Field, 2000; De Houwer et al, 2001; Lovibond and Shanks, 2002; Baeyens et al, 2005a; Hofmann et al, 2010).
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