摘要：Background: The relationship between awareness and associative learning is a key controversial issue that remains to be elucidated. An experiment was designed to assess associative learning with and without perceptual awareness. Method : Participants received repeated trials of two compatible stimuli sequences (S1 A → S2 A and S1 B → S2 B ), where S1 was a masked stimulus, and S2 an imperative stimulus for a reaction time (RT) task. After the acquisition phase, some probe trials of incompatible stimuli sequences (S1 A → S2 B and S1 B → S2 A ) were inserted among the compatible sequence trials during two testing sessions. Subsequently, subjects were classified as perceptually aware or perceptually unaware by means of a forced-choice identification task that was administered at the beginning and end of the experiment. Results : The results showed perceptually unaware participants responded faster to compatible than to incompatible stimuli sequences. However, no priming effect was observed in aware participants. Conclusions : These results are discussed in terms of an S-R associative mechanism and provide strong evidence of unconscious associative learning.
