Sweet reward increases implicit discrimination of similar odors.
Stimuli associated with emotional events signal the presence of potentially relevant situations, thus learning to rapidly identify this kind of stimuli can be highly beneficial. It has been demonstrated that individuals acquire a better perceptual representation of stimuli associated with negative and threatening emotional events. Here we investigated whether the same process occurs for stimuli associated with positive and rewarding emotional events. We used an appetitive Pavlovian conditioning paradigm during which one of two perceptually non-distinguishable odors was associated with a rewarding taste (i.e., chocolate). We investigated whether appetitive conditioning could improve the recognition of the odor associated with the reward, rendering it discriminable from its similar version that was never associated with the reward. Results revealed a dissociation between explicit perception and physiological reactions. Although participants were not able to explicitly perceive a difference, they reacted faster, inhaled more and had higher skin conductance responses when confronted with the reward-associated odor compared to its similar version that was never associated with the reward. Our findings have demonstrated that positive emotional associations can improve the implicit perceptual representation of odors, by triggering different physiological responses to odors that do not seem to be otherwise distinguishable.
Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva-CISA Geneva, Switzerland ; Laboratory for the Study of Emotion Elicitation and Expression, Department of Psychology, FPSE, University of Geneva Geneva, Switzerland.
Eva
E
Pool
Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva-CISA Geneva, Switzerland ; Laboratory for the Study of Emotion Elicitation and Expression, Department of Psychology, FPSE, University of Geneva Geneva, Switzerland.
Sylvain
S
Delplanque
Firmenich, SA Geneva, Switzerland.
Christelle
C
Porcherot
Laboratory for the Study of Emotion Elicitation and Expression, Department of Psychology, FPSE, University of Geneva Geneva, Switzerland.
Tatiana
T
Jenkins
Firmenich, SA Geneva, Switzerland.
Isabelle
I
Cayeux
Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva-CISA Geneva, Switzerland ; Laboratory for the Study of Emotion Elicitation and Expression, Department of Psychology, FPSE, University of Geneva Geneva, Switzerland.
David
D
Sander
emotional learning; incentive salience; odor discrimination; perceptual representation; reward; taste-odor conditioning