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Beyond evaluative conditioning? Searching for associative transfer of nonevaluative stimulus properties
Jan De Houwer1, Frank Baeyens, Tom Randell
1a University of Leuven , Belgium.
Abstract:
Evaluative conditioning refers to the changes in liking of an evaluatively neutral stimulus (the conditional stimulus or CS) as a result of merely pairing it with another, already liked or disliked stimulus (the unconditional stimulus or US). We examined whether other, non-evaluative stimulus properties of a US can also be associatively transferred to a CS. In a series of experiments, we tried to transfer perceptions of the gender of children and the gender of first names. We found evidence for the associative transfer of these properties but only when participants were aware of the contingencies.
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