Awareness and differential eyeblink conditioning: effects of manipulating auditory CS frequencies.

The role of awareness in differential delay eyeblink conditioning (EBC) has been a topic of much debate. We tested the idea that awareness is required for differential delay EBC when two cues are perceptually similar. The present study manipulated frequencies of auditory conditioned stimuli (CS) to vary CS similarity in three groups of participants. Our findings indicate that awareness was not necessary for differential delay EBC when two tones are easily discriminable, awareness was also not needed for relatively similar tones but may facilitate earlier conditioning, and awareness alone was not sufficient for differential delay EBC.