Affiliation:
1. Department of General Psychology II, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany
2. Department of Psychology, Health and Medical University Erfurt, Germany
Abstract
Abstract: A conditioned response to a stimulus can be transferred to an associated stimulus, as seen in sensory preconditioning. In this research paper, we aimed to explore this phenomenon using a stimulus–response contingency learning paradigm using voluntary actions as responses. We conducted two preregistered experiments that explored whether a learned response can be indirectly activated by a stimulus (S1) that was never directly paired with the response itself. Importantly, S1 was previously associated with another stimulus (S2) that was then directly and contingently paired with a response (S2-R contingency). In Experiment 1a, an indirect activation of acquired stimulus–response contingencies was present for audiovisual stimulus pairs wherein the stimulus association resembled a vocabulary learning setup. This result was replicated in Experiment 1b. Additionally, we found that the effect is moderated by having conscious awareness of the S1–S2 association and the S2-R contingency. By demonstrating indirect activation effects for voluntary actions, our findings show that principles of Pavlovian conditioning like sensory preconditioning also apply to contingency learning of stimulus–response relations for operant behavior.
Subject
General Psychology,Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous),Experimental and Cognitive Psychology,General Medicine