Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 10, Issue 4, December 2001, Pages 559-566
Consciousness and Cognition

Commentary
When All Is Still Concealed: Are We Closer to Understanding the Mechanisms Underlying Evaluative Conditioning?

https://doi.org/10.1006/ccog.2001.0529Get rights and content

Abstract

Fulcher and Hammerl's (2001) important exploration of the role of contingency awareness in evaluative conditioning (EC) raises a lot of issues for discussion: (1) what boundaries, if any, exist between EC and affective learning paradigms?; (2) if EC does occur without awareness does this mean it is nonpropositional learning?; (3) is EC driven by stimulus–response (S–R), rather than stimulus–stimulus (S–S), associations and if so should it then surprise us that contingency awareness is not important?; and (4) if S–R associations are at the heart of EC, should we automatically assume EC is part of a different learning mechanism to autonomic Pavlovian conditioning (Field, 2000a, 2000b)? This article, after a critical review of Fulcher and Hammerl's work, discusses these issues with reference to what can be realistically inferred about the mechanisms underlying EC.

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    Commentary on E. P. Fulcher & M. Hammerl (2001). When all is revealed: A dissociation between evaluative learning and contingency awareness. Consciousness and Cognition,10, 524–548, doi:10.1006/ccog.2001.0525.

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