Associative learning with and without perceptual awareness.

Résumé 0

"Background: The relationship between awareness and associative learning is a key controversial issue that remains to be elucidated. An experiment was designed to assess associative learning with and without perceptual awareness. Method: Participants received repeated trials of two compatible stimuli sequences (S1A S2A and S1B S2B), where S1 was a masked stimulus, and S2 an imperative stimulus for a reaction time (RT) task. After the acquisition phase, some probe trials of incompatible stimuli sequences (S1A S2B and S1B S2A) were inserted among the compatible sequence trials during two testing sessions. Subsequently, subjects were classifi ed as perceptually aware or perceptually unaware by means of a forced-choice identifi cation task that was administered at the beginning and end of the experiment. Results: The results showed perceptually unaware participants responded faster to compatible than to incompatible stimuli sequences. However, no priming effect was observed in aware participants. Conclusions: These results are discussed in terms of an S-R associative mechanism and provide strong evidence of unconscious associative learning."