A Behavioural Preparation for the Study of Human Pavlovian Conditioning

Abstract

Conditioned suppression is a useful technique for assessing whether subjects have learned a CS-US association, but it is difficult to use in humans because of the need for an aversive US. The purpose of this research was to develop a non-aversive procedure that would produce suppression. Subjects learned to press the space bar of a computer as part of a video game, but they had to stop pressing whenever a visual US appeared, or they would lose points. In Experiment 1, we used an A+/B− discrimination design: The US always followed Stimulus A and never followed Stimulus B. Although no information about the existence of CSs was given to the subjects, suppression ratio results showed a discrimination learning curve—that is, subjects learned to suppress responding in anticipation of the US when Stimulus A was present but not during the presentations of Stimulus B. Experiment 2 explored the potential of this preparation by using two different instruction sets and assessing post-experimental judgements of CS A and CS B in addition to suppression ratios. The results of these experiments suggest that conditioned suppression can be reliably and conveniently used in the human laboratory, providing a bridge between experiments on animal conditioning and experiments on human judgements of causality.