Like at first sight: Evaluative conditioning for high-novelty stimuli may not be qualified as an associative process

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is often presented as the best case for a purely automatic association form of evaluative learning. But recent evidence shed doubts on this claim and suggests that EC depends on goals (Corneille, et al., 2009) and does not occur without contingency awareness (Pleyers et al., 2007) nor without attentional resources (Pleyers, et al. 2009). ). However, Ruys and Stapel (2009) found that EC may occur without awareness for high-novelty stimuli. Hence, EC may be qualified as an associative process, at least for CSs characterized by little prior evaluative knowledge. In this context, one important question is whether EC of high-novelty stimuli is also insensitive to attentional resources. In the present study, for that purpose, high novelty stimuli were conditioned while participants were engaged in an auditory control task or a concurrent auditory 2-back task. Results reveal that EC of high-novelty stimuli is dependent on attentional resources. The role of contingency awareness in EC of high-novelty stimuli is also discussed.