Non-competitive liking for brands. No blocking in evaluative conditioning.

Area of Science:

• Consumer Psychology
• Cognitive Science
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Evaluative conditioning is a key mechanism shaping consumer preferences.
• Understanding how liking is learned, especially across different sensory modalities, is crucial for marketing.
• The role of predictive learning in the formation of preferences remains an active area of research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To demonstrate a novel across-modality evaluative conditioning procedure using abstract brand logos and foods.
• To investigate whether this learned preference formation is subject to blocking, a phenomenon typically seen in predictive learning.
• To explore the relationship between evaluative conditioning and predictive learning processes.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: Pictorial abstract brand logos (conditioned stimuli, CSs) were paired with self-selected foods of varying hedonic valence (unconditioned stimuli, USs) to establish evaluative conditioning.
• Experiment 2: A blocking paradigm was employed to test if prior conditioning of one CS would block learning for a redundant CS presented in compound with it.
• Utilized a within-subjects design to assess the strength of conditioning to target CSs under different pretraining conditions.

Main Results:

• Evaluative conditioning was successfully demonstrated using the novel across-modality procedure.
• The strength of evaluative conditioning to target CSs during compound training was not affected by whether the other CS in the compound was already pretrained with a hedonic US.
• Contingency learning about the target CS was blocked by the pretraining of the other CS.

Conclusions:

• Learned preferences (evaluative conditioning) and predictive learning appear to be mediated by distinct cognitive processes.
• The blocking effect observed in contingency learning suggests that the brain may prioritize novel predictive relationships over redundant ones.
• This research provides new insights into the dissociation between learning what we like and learning what to expect.