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09:00 - 10:30
Parallel sessions 1
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09:00 - 10:30
Room: HSZ - N5
Chair/s:
Carina G. Giesen
A growing body of literature documents that perception and action are supported by short-lived bindings between stimulus and response features. Notably, the relationship of binding and retrieval processes and learning mechanisms is complex and a point of ongoing debate in current cognitive research. While the concepts of binding and retrieval as proposed in action control research, e.g., by the Binding and Retrieval in Action Control (BRAC) framework, closely resemble processes in learning and memory on a theoretical level, empirical findings largely oppose a close relation. In this symposium, we explore recent views on the relations between binding and retrieval and learning processes across different types of learning effects.
We will present findings from a broad range of experimental paradigms like stimulus-response and response-response binding, contingency learning, and evaluative conditioning.
These data will be used to highlight different perspectives on the intersections of binding and learning effects. Five talks will unravel how potent factors like contingency awareness, number and frequency of presentations, and time since the last stimulus occurrence affect binding/retrieval and/or learning effects. Together, these findings further our understanding of the relation between binding and learning.
Submission 237
The Last Impression Counts: Recency Retrieval Effects in Evaluative Conditioning
SymposiumTalk-05
Presented by: Carina G. Giesen
Carina G. Giesen 1, Jasmin Richter 2
1 HMU Health and Medical University Erfurt, Germany
2 University of Oslo, Norway
Liking of a previously neutral stimulus can change based on co-occurrences with positive or negative stimuli, a phenomenon denoted evaluative conditioning (EC). Prior research suggests that EC depends on information about previous stimulus pairings that is remembered when the neutral stimulus is evaluated. According to recent findings, from contingency learning (Rothermund et al., 2025), the temporal distance to the last occurrence of a given stimulus determines which information about its previous occurrences is retrieved, favoring recent information after short temporal delays and frequent information after longer delays. In this research, we tested whether EC follows the same retrieval principles. Initial evidence in favor of this account was based on a modified EC procedure that included CS ratings during learning. In the present studies, we changed the procedure back to a traditional EC procedure without CS ratings during learning. We found that EC reflected the valence of the most recently paired valence, but not of the most frequently paired valence, when measured shortly after a pairing. Conversely, when measured after a longer temporal interval, EC reflected the most frequently paired valence, but not the most recently paired valence. These results support a role of episodic memory and retrieval in EC. Our research highlights parallels to contingency learning and suggests that episodic memory processes govern various types of learning resulting from stimulus contingencies.