Online research in philosophy

To make possible the integration proposed by Domjan et al., psychologists first need to close the research gap between behavioral ecology and the study of Pavlovian conditioning. I suggest two strategies, namely, to adopt more behavioral ecological approaches to social behavior or to co-opt problems already addressed by behavioral ecologists that are especially well suited to the study of Pavlovian conditioning.

Biologists recognize Pavlovian conditioning as a mechanism by which individuals can adaptively modify their social and nonsocial behavior quickly to relevant features of the natural environment. This commentary supports Domjan et al.'s point that psychologists could gain important insights by broadening the range of species and behaviors they study and by continuing to adopt a functional perspective to investigate Pavlovian conditioning and other forms of learning.

A convincing case is made for the importance of conditioning in social interaction, but more than Pavlovian conditioning is involved: UR (unconditioned response) modification, imprinting, Skinnerian conditioning, and other forms of behavior modification are adduced as Pavlovian. Beyond its value as an icon, control theory is not brought to bear in an informative fashion on these phenomena.

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.

In her commentary of Field (1999), Hammerl (1999) has drawn attention to several interesting points concerning the issue of contingency awareness in evaluative conditioning. First, she comments on several contentious issues arising from Field's review of the evaluative conditioning literature, second she critiques the data from his pilot study and finally she argues the case that EC is a distinct form of conditioning that can occur in the absence of contingency awareness. With reference to these criticisms, this reply attempts to address Hammerl's comments by exploring the issues of how awareness is defined, how it is best measured, and whether it is reasonable to believe that EC uniformly occurs in the absence of contingency awareness. The article concludes that the available evidence supports Field's proposition that EC is, in fact, Pavlovian learning.

There is good evidence that, in general, autonomic conditioning in humans occurs only when subjects can verbalize the contingencies of conditioning. However, one form of conditioning, evaluative conditioning (EC), seems exceptional in that a growing body of evidence suggests that it can occur without conscious contingency awareness. As such, EC offers a unique insight into what role contingency awareness might play in associative learning. Despite this evidence, there are reasons to doubt that evaluative conditioning can occur without conscious awareness. This paper aims to critically review the EC literature and to draw some parallels to what is known about autonomic conditioning. In doing so, some important general issues about measuring contingency awareness are raised. These issues are illustrated with a brief report of an experiment in which a sensitive measure of contingency awareness is compared against a commonly used measure.