Absence Of Contingency Awareness Research Articles

Reliable evidence for implicit attentional responses to aversive conditioned stimuli.

Evidence for implicit aversive learning effects has been criticized for its lack of experimental rigor and statistical reliability. Here we examine whether attentional emotional responses to aversive conditioned stimuli can occur in the absence of stimulus-outcome contingency awareness, and use a novel Bayesian tool to reliably perform a post hoc categorization of awareness. Across two experiments (n = 40 and 69) participants completed an aversive conditioning task. A novel Bayesian awareness categorization tool was applied to sensitively measure contingency awareness. Finally, attentional and subjective responses toward conditioned stimuli were measured. For participants unaware of contingencies, conditioned stimuli generated attentional avoidance, but only aware participants showed subjective learning effects. For both experiments, awareness scores for unaware participants did not regress above chance level on a subsequent awareness check, revealing a reliable determination of unawareness states. These findings provide evidence for the existence of aversive learning in the absence of contingency awareness, as demonstrated via conditioned attentional responses, and build an analytical framework that can be extrapolated to other implicit paradigms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Fear generalization of implicit conditioned facial features – Behavioral and magnetoencephalographic correlates

Acquired fear responses often generalize from conditioned stimuli (CS) towards perceptually similar, but harmless generalization stimuli (GS). Knowledge on similarities between CS and GS may be explicit or implicit. Employing behavioral measures and whole-head magnetoencephalography, we here investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms underpinning implicit fear generalization. Twenty-nine participants underwent a classical conditioning procedure in which 32 different faces were either paired with an aversive scream (16 CS+) or remained unpaired (16 CS-). CS+ and CS- faces systematically differed from each other regarding their ratio of eye distance and mouth width. High versus low values on this “threat-related feature (TF)” implicitly predicted the presence or absence of the aversive scream. In pre- and post-conditioning phases, all CS and 32 novel GS faces were presented. 16 GS+ ​faces shared the TF of the 16 CS+ ​faces, while 16 ​GS- faces shared the TF of the 16 CS- faces. Behavioral tests confirmed that participants were fully unaware of TF-US contingencies. CS+ ​compared to CS- faces revealed higher unpleasantness, arousal and US-expectancy ratings. A generalization of these behavioral fear responses to GS+ ​compared to GS- faces was observed by trend only. Source-estimations of event-related fields showed stronger neural responses to both CS+ and GS+ ​compared to CS- and GS- in anterior temporal (<100 ​ms) and temporo-occipital (<150 ​ms; 553–587 ​ms) ventral brain regions. Reverse effects were found in dorsal frontal areas (<100 ​ms; 173–203 ​ms; 257–290 ​ms). Neural data also revealed selectively enhanced responses to CS+ ​but not GS+ ​stimuli in occipital regions (110–167 ​ms; 330–413 ​ms), indicating perceptual discrimination. Our data suggest that the prioritized perceptual analysis of threat-associated conditioned faces in ventral networks rapidly generalizes to novel faces sharing threat-related features. This generalization process occurs in absence of contingency awareness and may thus contribute to implicit attentional biases. The coexisting perceptual discrimination suggests that fear generalization is not a mere consequence of insufficient stimulus discrimination but rather an active, integrative process.

Approach-Avoidance Training Effects Are Moderated by Awareness of Stimulus-Action Contingencies.

Prior research suggests that repeatedly approaching or avoiding a stimulus changes the liking of that stimulus. In two experiments, we investigated the relationship between, on one hand, effects of approach-avoidance (AA) training on implicit and explicit evaluations of novel faces and, on the other hand, contingency awareness as indexed by participants' memory for the relation between stimulus and action. We observed stronger effects for faces that were classified as contingency aware and found no evidence that AA training caused changes in stimulus evaluations in the absence of contingency awareness. These findings challenge the standard view that AA training effects are (exclusively) the product of implicit learning processes, such as the automatic formation of associations in memory.

Rapid and Highly Resolving: Affective Evaluation of Olfactorily Conditioned Faces

Evidence from hemodynamic and electrophysiological measures suggests that the processing of emotionally relevant information occurs in a spatially and temporally distributed affective network. ERP studies of emotional stimulus processing frequently report differential responses to emotional stimuli starting around 120 msec. However, the involvement of structures that seem to become activated at earlier latencies (i.e., amygdala and OFC) would allow for more rapid modulations, even in distant cortical areas. Consistent with this notion, recent ERP studies investigating associative learning have provided evidence for rapid modulations in sensory areas earlier than 120 msec, but these studies either used simple and/or very few stimuli. The present study used high-density whole-head magneto-encephalography to measure brain responses to a multitude of neutral facial stimuli, which were associated with an aversive or neutral odor. Significant emotional modulations were observed at intervals of 50-80 and 130-190 msec in frontal and occipito-temporal regions, respectively. In the absence of contingency awareness and with only two learning instances, a remarkable capacity for emotional learning is observed.

Emotion-Associated Tones Attract Enhanced Attention at Early Auditory Processing: Magnetoencephalographic Correlates

Emotionally significant objects and events in our environment attract attention based on their motivational relevance for survival. Such kind of emotional attention is thought to lead to affect-specific amplified processing that closely resembles effects of directed attention. Although there has been extensive research on prioritized processing of visual emotional stimuli, the spatio-temporal dynamics of motivated attention mechanisms in auditory processing are less clearly understood. We investigated modulatory effects of emotional attention at early auditory processing stages using time-sensitive whole-head magnetoencephalography. A novel associative learning procedure involving multiple conditioned stimuli (CSs) per affective category was introduced to specifically test whether affect-specific modulation can proceed in a rapid and highly differentiating fashion in humans. Auditory evoked fields (AEFs) were recorded in response to 42 different ultrashort, click-like sounds before and after affective conditioning with pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral auditory scenes. As hypothesized, emotional attention affected neural click tone processing at time intervals of the P20-50m (20-50 ms) and the N1m (100-130 ms), two early AEF components sensitive to directed selective attention (Woldorff et al., 1993). Distributed source localization revealed amplified processing of tones associated with aversive or pleasant compared with neutral auditory scenes at auditory sensory, frontal and parietal cortex regions. Behavioral tests did not indicate any awareness for the contingent CS-UCS (unconditioned stimulus) relationships in the participants, suggesting affective associative learning in absence of contingency awareness. Our findings imply early and highly differentiating affect-specific modulation of auditory stimulus processing supported by neural mechanisms and circuitry comparable with those reported for directed auditory attention.

Revisiting the relation between contingency awareness and attention: Evaluative conditioning relies on a contingency focus

Although evaluative conditioning has occasionally been demonstrated in the absence of contingency awareness, many recent studies imply that its acquisition depends on the availability of attentional resources during conditioning. In previous experiments attention has typically been manipulated in a general way rather than looking at the particular focus of attention. The present study investigated the role of a focus on the CS–US contingency. Two separate distraction tasks were designed that either diverted attention from the stimuli or directed it to the stimuli while drawing attention away from the contingency between the stimuli. Both types of distraction were shown to eliminate evaluative conditioning. Significant evaluative conditioning was observed in a third group of participants who were required to attend the contingencies. A mediation analysis showed that the observed discrepancy in evaluative conditioning effects between groups was mediated by contingency awareness. The results imply that attention in terms of a stimulus focus is not sufficient for evaluative conditioning to occur. Rather, attention to the contingencies between stimuli appears to be crucial in evaluative conditioning, because it is supposed to foster the acquisition of contingency awareness.

Aversive Conditioning under Conditions of Restricted Awareness: Effects on Spatial Cueing

In the literature on aversive conditioning there is still debate on the role of awareness. According to some authors, affective learning can occur with or without contingency learning (dual-process model), whereas others argue that a single process produces both affective responses and contingency knowledge. Although many studies have investigated these models, the results to date are inconclusive. Based on a review of the literature, a new series of experiments was designed to examine aversive conditioning in the absence of contingency awareness. In the present study we examined the effects of subliminal aversive conditioning on a spatial cueing task. Awareness was stringently tested after conditioning. Three kinds of awareness were distinguished: contingency awareness (awareness of the CS-US contingencies, where CS is the conditioned stimulus, and US is the unconditioned stimulus), perceptual awareness (awareness of the perceptual differences between the CSs), and US expectancy (awareness of a threat feeling when confronted with the CS+, but not when confronted with the CS-). The results of three experiments demonstrated that responses on the spatial cueing task were modulated by subliminal aversive conditioning. Importantly, none of the participants was contingency aware or able to perceptually discriminate between the conditioned stimuli. However, in Experiment 3, only those participants showing some level of postconditioning expectancy awareness exhibited conditioning effects. These experiments suggest that subliminal aversive conditioning produces small but significant effects, which may be modulated by expectancy awareness.

New buzzwords - early cortical responses to pseudo words after affective conditioning

Event Abstract Back to Event New buzzwords - early cortical responses to pseudo words after affective conditioning Magdalene Ortmann1*, Christian Dobel1, Johanna Kissler2 and Markus Junghöfer1 1 University of Münster, Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis, Germany 2 University of Konstanz, Institute for Clinical Psychology, Germany Emotional compared to neutral words receive preferential processing at visual sensory cortex regions starting already at 200ms [1]. Convergent effects have been shown for various kinds of emotional visual stimuli and are assumed to reflect motivated attention leading to top-down re-entrant modulation of sensory processing. Using associative learning with a multitude of different faces we have recently been able to show that aversively conditioned faces evoke motivated attention and convergent correlates of amplified sensory processing beginning around 130ms and even in absence of contingency awareness [2]. Additionally we found preferential sensory CS+ processing already before 100ms supporting two-pathway models as for instance suggested by LeDoux [3,“low road – high road”] or Bullier [4, “fast brain”]. Here we aimed to investigate whether this rapid and implicit emotional learning occurs also for words and whether magnetoencephalographic correlates can support the idea that rapid “low road” or ‘fast brain” processing is a general phenomenon and not limited to biological stimuli. 52 pseudo words were paired three times each with one of 52 pictures depicting aversive or neutral objects (shark, bottle, etc.). Comparison of event related fields to pseudo word presentation before and after learning confirmed our hypotheses, showing enhanced sensory activity for aversively conditioned pseudo-words after learning at an early (“low road”) and a mid-latency (“high road”) interval of information processing. These results were supported by behavioral tests showing significant effects of emotional content even in the absence of contingency awareness.

Does Affective Learning Exist in the Absence of Contingency Awareness?

The proposal that affective learning, the learning of likes and dislikes, can exist in the absence of contingency awareness, whereas signal learning, the learning of stimulus relationships, cannot, was investigated in a differential conditioning paradigm that was embedded in a visual masking task. Startle magnitude modulation and changes in verbal ratings served as measures of affective learning, whereas skin conductance was taken to reflect signal learning. Awareness was assessed online with an expectancy dial and in a postexperimental questionnaire. Both between-subject comparisons of verbalizers and nonverbalizers and within-subject comparisons of verbalizers before and after verbalization failed to reveal any evidence for learning, whether affective or otherwise, in the absence of knowledge of the stimulus contingencies.