Evaluative conditioning (EC), a change in valence of a stimulus due to its co-occurrences with other stimuli, is frequently used to study attitude formation. The present studies investigate whether EC is influenced by whether the co-occurring stimuli have their onset at the same (vs. different) time, i.e., their onset (a)synchrony. To this end, we introduce a novel and sensitive measure which tests EC effects immediately after their assumed origin, i.e., after the co-occurrence of two stimuli in the conditioning phase. A pretest supported the validity of this measure. Study 1 showed that EC effects assessed during conditioning were smaller when paired stimuli had asynchronous onsets and a smaller temporal overlap. Yet, onset synchrony did not affect EC effects in Study 2 when temporal overlap of stimuli was held constant. Together these results suggest that EC is not affected by stimulus onset synchrony but might be affected by the amount of temporal overlap of the paired stimuli. Neither study showed effects of these pairing manipulations on EC effects assessed after the conditioning phase. Still, EC effects observed during conditioning strongly predicted EC effects observed after conditioning. Together our studies establish the new online measure and its usefulness in investigating theoretical questions of EC. Our findings extend previous research on the benefits of temporal contiguity of stimulus co-occurrences and provide new insight into the relation of post-conditioning EC and single stimulus co-occurrences during the conditioning phase.

中文翻译：

---

同时配对增加评价条件反射：时间重叠而不是开始同步作用的证据


评价条件反射 （EC） 是由于刺激与其他刺激共现而导致的效价变化，经常用于研究态度形成。本研究调查了 EC 是否受到同时发生的刺激是否在同一（而不是不同）时间开始的影响，即它们的开始 （a） 同步。为此，我们引入了一种新颖而敏感的措施，该措施在假设的起源后立即测试 EC 效应，即在条件反射阶段两种刺激共同发生之后。一项预测试支持该措施的有效性。研究 1 表明，当配对刺激具有异步开始和较小的时间重叠时，在调节期间评估的 EC 效应较小。然而，在研究 2 中，当刺激的时间重叠保持不变时，发作同步性不会影响 EC 效应。总之，这些结果表明 EC 不受刺激开始同步性的影响，但可能受到配对刺激的时间重叠量的影响。两项研究均未显示这些配对操作对调节阶段后评估的 EC 效果的影响。尽管如此，在调节期间观察到的 EC 效应强烈预测了调节后观察到的 EC 效应。我们的研究共同建立了新的在线测量及其在调查 EC 理论问题中的有用性。我们的研究结果扩展了先前关于刺激共现时间连续性好处的研究，并为条件反射阶段后调节 EC 和单一刺激共现的关系提供了新的见解。