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Related Concept Videos

Purposive Learning01:22

Purposive Learning

E. C. Tolman emphasized the purposiveness of behavior — the idea that much of our behavior is goal-directed. For instance, employees who aim for a promotion work diligently to meet their targets. Tolman argued that when classical conditioning and operant conditioning occur, the organism acquires certain expectations. In classical conditioning, a child might fear a dog because they expect it to bite. In operant conditioning, a person might consistently work overtime because they expect a bonus...
The Placebo Effect01:54

The Placebo Effect

The placebo effect occurs when people's expectations or beliefs influence or determine their experience in a given situation. In other words, simply expecting something to happen can actually make it happen.
Blind Procedures02:07

Blind Procedures

Ideally, the people who observe and record the children’s behavior are unaware of who was assigned to the experimental or control group, in order to control for experimenter bias. Experimenter bias refers to the possibility that a researcher’s expectations might skew the results of the study. Remember, conducting an experiment requires a lot of planning, and the people involved in the research project have a vested interest in supporting their hypotheses. If the observers knew which child was...
Cognitive Learning01:21

Cognitive Learning

Cognitive learning is based on purposive behavior, incidental learning, and insight learning.
E. C. Tolman's theory of purposive behavior emphasizes that much behavior is goal-directed. He argued that to understand behavior, we must look at the entire sequence of actions leading to a goal. For instance, high school students study hard, not just due to past reinforcement but also to achieve the goal of getting into a good college.
Tolman introduced the idea that behavior is influenced by...
Implicit Memories01:24

Implicit Memories

Implicit memories, also known as non-declarative memories, are long-term memories that function outside of conscious awareness. These memories influence behavior and skills without explicit knowledge. This type of memory is evident in tasks like playing tennis, snowboarding, and texting. Implicit memory has three subsystems: procedural memory, conditioning, and priming. This type of memory is essential in various activities, from everyday tasks to specialized skills.
One key aspect of implicit...
Classical Conditioning in Daily Life01:17

Classical Conditioning in Daily Life

Classical conditioning, a fundamental principle of associative learning, explains various phenomena observed in daily life, such as fear development, the placebo effect, taste aversion, and drug habituation. These applications demonstrate the profound impact of associative learning on human behavior and physiological responses.
John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner famously demonstrated the development of fear through classical conditioning in their experiment with Little Albert. They paired the...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 4, 2026

How to Study Placebo Responses in Motion Sickness with a Rotation Chair Paradigm in Healthy Participants
08:50

How to Study Placebo Responses in Motion Sickness with a Rotation Chair Paradigm in Healthy Participants

Published on: December 14, 2014

Can expectancies produce placebo effects for implicit learning?

Ben Colagiuri1, Evan J Livesey, Justin A Harris

  • 1School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. b.colagiuri@uws.edu.au

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
|February 18, 2011
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Positive or negative expectations can influence performance on nonconscious tasks. This study shows that instructional manipulation can create placebo effects, impacting implicit learning without conscious awareness.

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Last Updated: Jun 4, 2026

How to Study Placebo Responses in Motion Sickness with a Rotation Chair Paradigm in Healthy Participants
08:50

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Published on: December 14, 2014

Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effect of Induced Emotion on Grammar Learning
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Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effect of Induced Emotion on Grammar Learning

Published on: January 29, 2020

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies
05:22

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Published on: May 9, 2019

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Behavioral Science

Background:

  • The placebo effect demonstrates real physiological and psychological changes from inert interventions.
  • Understanding the scope of placebo effects on cognitive processes, particularly nonconscious ones, remains an active area of research.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if instructional manipulation can induce placebo effects on implicit learning, a nonconscious cognitive task.
  • To determine if expectations influence performance in a visual search task with hidden contingencies.

Main Methods:

  • 464 university students performed a visual search task with odor exposure (or no odor).
  • Participants received positive, negative, or neutral information about the odor's effects.
  • The task included a nonconscious contingency where distractor patterns cued target locations.

Main Results:

  • Positive expectations led to faster reaction times on cued trials.
  • Negative expectations resulted in slower reaction times on cued trials compared to neutral expectations.
  • The influence of the contingency (cuing effect) was nonconscious, as participants could not consciously recognize the patterns.

Conclusions:

  • Instructional manipulations can generate placebo effects on nonconscious cognitive processes like implicit learning.
  • Expectations can modulate performance on tasks without conscious awareness of the underlying mechanism.
  • This research expands the understanding of placebo effects beyond conscious perception and control.