A SCR investigation of the Perruchet effect (3)

This study aimed to determine whether the conditioned stimulus (CS) in the electrodermal version of the Perruchet effect is instrumental to the production of said effect. In the Perruchet effect a single stimulus (the CS) is paired with a second stimulus (the unconditioned stimulus, US) on half the trials and on the other half of the trials the US is not presented. Conditioned responding to the CS is typically found to dissociate from conscious expectancy for the US. In this experiment the US is an electric shock and the conditioned response is change in skin conductance response (SCR). Importantly there is only a discrete CS in this experiment. If the CS is important in the production of the Perruchet effect then manipulation of the CS-US relationship in this experiment should distort SCR, whereas if the CS-US relationship is not important then a similar SCR pattern should be produced to that seen in previous Perruchet experiments.