Emotional Overshadowing: Pleasant and Unpleasant Cues Overshadow Neutral Cues in Human Associative Learning.

ABSTRACT: When learning about stimuli comprised of multiple cues, humans and other animals tend to form stronger cue-outcome associations for more salient cues than for less salient cues. This phenomenon, termed overshadowing, has typically been demonstrated between cues that vary in salience because of differences in physical intensity. In this study, we investigated whether differences in the emotional valence of cues in a compound stimulus similarly led to differences in the strength of cue-outcome learning. Using a probabilistic categorisation task in which stimuli were compounds consisting of pairs of emotional or non-emotional cue images, we found consistent evidence for emotional overshadowing across both an initial exploratory study (N = 50) and a confirmatory preregiste

SUBMITTER: Zhu J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11461368 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature