The role of contingency awareness in single-cue human eyeblink conditioning
- 1School of Social Sciences and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, 2751, Australia
- 2School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2052, Australia
Abstract
Single-cue delay eyeblink conditioning is presented as a prototypical example of automatic, nonsymbolic learning that is carried out by subcortical circuits. However, it has been difficult to assess the role of cognition in single-cue conditioning because participants become aware of the simple stimulus contingency so quickly. In this experiment (n = 166), we masked the contingency to reduce awareness. We observed a strong relationship between contingency awareness and conditioned responding, with both trace and delay procedures. This finding suggests that explicit associative knowledge and anticipatory behavior are regulated by a coordinated system rather than by functionally and neurally distinct systems.
Footnotes
-
↵3 Corresponding author
E-mail G.Weidemann{at}uws.edu.au
-
[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
- Received December 9, 2012.
- Accepted April 26, 2013.
- © 2013, Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
This article is distributed exclusively by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the first 12 months after the full-issue publication date (see http://learnmem.cshlp.org/site/misc/terms.xhtml). After 12 months, it is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.
