Correlation between awareness of the CS-UCS relationship and the effect of evaluative conditioning

Abstract

Some of the experimental evidence about the independence between awareness and evaluative conditioning arises from studies that employ correlational analysis. In this paper, we criticise some aspects of these studies and carry out an experiment in which we try to solve the problems they entail. Data show a positive and significant correlation between explicit knowledge about CS-UCS contingencies and conditioning effect size. The differences between this pattern of results and the one found in the former experiments are fitted into a model of evaluative conditio- ning. The model proposes two concurrent processes which operate as function of stimuli class and involve different levels of awareness.