Cue-competition in Evaluative Conditioning 2

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is a change in the evaluation of a stimulus (CS) after the stimulus co-occurred with positive stimuli (USpos) or negative stimuli (USneg). Using different designs, three experiments paired one CS (CS1) with a US and examined whether EC decreased when the US also occurred with CS2. The experiments found that sharing a US with another CS decreased EC, although Experiment 2 found that effect only for a CS that occurred with USpos and not for CS that occurred with USneg. Experiments 2 and 3 refuted the alternative account that the EC of CS1 is moderated by any additional occurrences of the US without CS1, rather than by the occurrences of the US with CS2. Together, these results suggest that cue-competition decreases EC when two CSs occur separately with the same US. We discuss two possible accounts for the finding: a contrast effect on judgment and competition on mental resources. We argue that current EC theories are limited in explaining the present finding because they are missing explicit assumptions about what influences evaluative response