This week, Mandy Hütter (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen) visits to give a presentation (Thursday 17 October).

A sampling approach to evaluative conditioning (Mandy Hütter & Max Ihmels, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)

A key paradigm in research on the development of preferences is evaluative conditioning (EC). In an EC procedure, a conditioned stimulus (CS) is paired with positive or negative unconditioned stimuli (USs) and consequently acquires US valence. In our sampling approach to EC, we give participants control over which CSs they want to sample (i.e., for what CSs they want to see conditioning trials). To distinguish between the effects of sampled information and sampling decisions, we also introduced a yoked condition, in which participants saw the same information produced by the sampling condition, but did not get to make any decisions. I will present four experiments that established the basic paradigm (Experiments 1 and 2), investigated the effect of not sampling a stimulus on evaluations (Experiment 3), and investigated the role of hedonic versus epistemic motivation on sampling and its effects on evaluations (Experiment 4). These experiments demonstrate several mechanisms via which agency can alter evaluative learning and highlight avenues for future research.