Awareness and Conditioning: Who Becomes Aware?

1. Awareness and Conditioning: Who Becomes Aware? Tommy Cavanagh, B.A.1, Christopher G. Courtney, B.A.1, Louise D. Cosand, B.A.1, Anthony J. Rissling, M.A.1, Michael E. Dawson, Ph.D.1, Anne M. Schell, Ph.D.2 1Department of Psychology, University of Southern California2Department of Psychology, Occidental College Correspondence to Christopher G. Courtney, E-mail: cgcourtn@usc.edu RESULTS BACKGROUND • Participants • 67 college students • Procedure (see timeline in Figure 1) • 1. Pre conditioning rating of faces • 2. Rest period (5 minutes) • NS-SCRs- Number of nonspecific skin conductance responses are recorded during rest • SCL- Skin conductance level is recorded during rest • 3. Acquisition • 24 trials (12 CS+, 12 CS-, 75% reinforced) • Visual Memory task, in which participants report the ordinal position of a target face, serves as the distracting task (see Figure 2) • Trial by trial verbal report of contingency awareness • 4. Post conditioning rating of faces • 5. Post conditioning questionnaire assessing contingency awareness • 6. Extinction Embedding CS-UCS pairings within distracting tasks can prevent most college student participants from becoming aware of the CS-UCS contingency. Although there are some exceptions (see adjacent poster), under most conditions, these unaware participants do not show successful conditioning. Nevertheless, some subjects become aware despite the distracting task, and do show conditioning. What is different about those who become aware and those who remain unaware? High arousal restricts the breadth of information one can process (Easterbrook, 1959; Gjerde, 1983). Therefore, it is hypothesized that: Participants who fail to become aware will have higher levels of autonomic arousal than those who do become aware. Awareness- 23 participants became aware and 44 participants failed to become aware of the CS-UCS contingency. NS-SCRs – Participants who failed to become aware had significantly more NS-SCRs during rest than participants who became aware (p < .01), Figure 3a. SCL- Participants who failed to become aware had higher SCL during rest than participants who became aware, though not significantly (p = .18), Figure 3b. HYPOTHESIS Figure 3b Figure 3a CONCLUSIONS High levels of arousal limit attention to peripheral tasks (Easterbrook, 1959; Gjerde, 1983). A “visual memory” distracting task was instructed to be the main focus to participants, while becoming aware of the CS-UCS contingency was an incidental learning task. Subjects who failed to become aware of the incidental CS-UCS contingency had higher levels of arousal than those who became aware. METHODS REFERENCES Easterbrook, J.A. (1959). The effect of emotion on cue utilization and the organization of behavior. Psychological Review, 66(3), 183-201. Gjerde, F.P. (1983). Attentional capacity dysfunction and arousal in schizophrenia. Psychological Bulletin, 93(1), 57-72. Figure 2) Distracting task – Participants are presented a sequence of four faces and then report the ordinal position of the “target” face. They then report expectancy of a negative or neutral stimulus to assess awareness of the CS-UCS contingency. Figure 1) Procedural timeline of events