Awareness and Intertrial Activity in Verbal Conditioning

Abstract

It was hypothesized that, in VOC, the relationship between awareness and performance gains would be a function of the experimental conditions during training. Fifty-six naive Ss were assigned to 1 of 4 experimental conditions. Each group performed the Taffel sentence-construction task. This was the only treatment given one group; a second group was required to perform a color-naming task between trials. A third group was required to write their “thoughts about the experiment” between blocks of trials, while a fourth group was required to perform both the intertrial and the inter-block tasks. All groups demonstrated significant performance gains. The color-naming task resulted in significantly less performance gain, as expected, but, contrary to expectation, did not significantly inhibit the development of awareness. The discrepancies between the present results and those of previous studies were explored as were the implications for understanding the VOC process.