The impact of evaluative conditioning on early sensory processing

情感态度可以被定义为习得的行为倾向，这种倾向会对一个对象产生积极或消极的反应。这种情感分类（愉快/不愉快，好/坏）可以很容易地改变（例如，通过条件反射），使个体能够适应环境中遇到的不稳定情况。评价性条件反射指的是由于在时间或空间上与正效价或负效价的刺激在近距离上呈现刺激而引起的对刺激的喜爱程度的变化。尽管假设这些刺激评价的变化即使在没有意识或注意的情况下也会发生，但越来越多的经验证据表明，在大多数情况下，评价条件作用需要有意识地回忆刺激配对。由于这些结果与联想学习中的命题过程的争论特别相关，最近对评价条件反射的研究（几乎完全）集中在评价条件反射的认知先决条件上。随之而来的是对这些习得评价对知觉和认知信息处理的影响的忽视。有趣的是，联想学习的注意理论通常假设学习和注意之间存在相互关系：一方面，学习需要注意资源，另一方面，了解刺激应该会影响对刺激的注意量。对偶然性学习的研究发现，更长的凝视停留时间和更快的检测阈值可以预测之前学习任务的特定结果。在这个项目中，我的目的是研究评价条件作用在多大程度上调节早期感觉加工、视觉注意和前注意知觉的参数。由于命题模型假设情感和认知联想学习基于共同的学习机制，因此可以预期，命题评价条件反射对早期感觉加工的影响尤其明显。相反，在条件反射过程中缺乏认知资源的情况下（即，当评估性变化基于非命题学习过程时），感官效果可能会降低。一种评估条件作用的知觉-运动解释假设价移是感觉和运动信号之间的外周联系的结果。

Affective attitudes can be defined as learned behavioral dispositions that bias positive or negative responses toward an object. Such affective categorizations (pleasant/unpleasant, good/bad) can easily be changed (e.g., through conditioning), allowing the individual to adaptively interact with instable circumstances that are encountered in the environment. Evaluative conditioning refers to a change of the liking of a stimulus as a result of presenting it in close temporal or spatial proximity with an stimulus of either positive or negative valence. Although it was assumed that these changes in stimulus evaluations can occur even in the absence of awareness or attention, there is a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that, in most cases, evaluative conditioning required conscious recollection of the stimulus pairings. As these results are particularly relevant to the debate of propositional processes in associative learning, recent research on evaluative conditioning focused (almost exclusively) onthe cognitive prerequisites of evaluative conditioning. This came along with a neglect of the impact of these learned evaluations on perceptual and cognitive information rocessing. Interestingly, attentional theories of associative learning typically assume areciprocal relationship between learning and attention: On the one hand, attentional resources are required for learning, and on the other hand, learning about a stimulus is supposed to influence the amount of attention that is directed to the stimulus. Studies on contingency learning found that longer gaze dwell times and faster detectionthresholds for stimuli that were learned to be predictive of a certain outcome in a previous learning task. In this project, I aim to investigate to what extent evaluative conditioning modulates parameters of early senory processing, visual attention andpreattentive perception. As propositional models assume affective and cognitive associative learning to be based on a common learning mechanism, effects on early sensory processing would be expected in particular for propositional evaluative conditioning. In contrast, reduced sensory effects may be expected in the absence of cognitive resources during conditioning (i.e., when the evaluative change is based on non-propositional learning processes). A perceptual-motor account of evaluative conditioning assuming the valence shift to be the result of peripheral associations between sensory and motor signals is to be developed.