Contingency awareness and evaluative conditioning: when will it be enough?

The role of contingency awareness in evaluative conditioning has been a contentious issue for quite some time now. Several papers provide a review of the relevant evidence (De Houwer, Baeyens, & Hendrickx, 1997a; De Houwer, Thomas, & Baeyens, in press; Field, 2000; Lovibond & Shanks, in press; Shanks & St. John, 1994), but the conclusions that are reached differ markedly. For instance, whereas De Houwer et al. (in press) concluded that evaluative conditioning is largely independent of contingency awareness, Field (2000, p. 32) argued that there is little unequivocal evidence that evaluative conditioning without contingency awareness is a robust finding. The results of Fulcher and Hammerl provide another interesting contribution to the debate. The aim of this commentary is to illustrate how even a single series of studies such as those of Fulcher and Hammerl can be interpreted in different ways depending on one’s perspective. I will first adopt a sceptical point of view and will try to argue that the evidence presented by Fulcher and Hammerl does not provide conclusive evidence for unconscious evaluative conditioning. Afterward, I will look at the same studies from a more open, broader point of view and argue that the reported results are important and that they are in line with the results of many previous results which also support the hypothesis that, in comparison to other forms of Pavlovian conditioning, evaluative conditioning is largely independent of contingency awarenes