Trace classical conditioning in a non-clinical obsessive-compulsive population

Obsessive-Compulsive (OC) etiology was investigated with trace conditioning. Mower's two-factor theory of anxiety suggests that anxious participants are particularly quick to link neutral conditioned stimuli (CSs) to negative unconditioned stimuli (USs), leading to protective conditioned responses (CRs) to previously neutral CSs. Clark and Squire (1998) suggested that lack of temporal overlap of USs and CSs in trace conditioning necessitates explicit participant awareness of stimuli relations for conditioning acquisition. The preliminary hypothesis explored is that people with anxiety disorder characteristics will show accelerated acquisition of trace conditioning and more ability to articulate stimuli relationships as compared to controls.; These hypotheses were tested empirically with a trace eye blink classical conditioning study completed by 28 non-clinical undergraduate OC participants and 29 gender matched control participants. The US was a puff of air to the participant's eye, which elicited an unconditioned response (UR), an eyeblink. CSs were 85 dB white noise bursts and 1 kHz pure tones. The CS+ always preceded the US, and the CS- always appeared alone. The CR measured was the participant's blink following the CS but preceding the US. Participants received 120 pseudo-randomly arranged CS+ and CS- trials. Understanding of stimuli relations was assessed with Clark and Squires' (1998) 17-item trace conditioning awareness questionnaire.; Although both OC and control groups demonstrated discrimination between CS+ and CS- responses, no statistically significant differences in conditioning were found between the two groups. No increase in percentage CRs over time was seen in either group. Mixed support was found for articulation of stimulus contingencies predicting acquisition of conditioning. No difference was found between OC and controls in ability to articulate stimulus contingencies. OC participants' previously shown accelerated learning was suggested to result from engaging neural mechanisms used for explicit learning while controls relied on implicit learning neural mechanisms during the same tasks. The current findings were interpreted as showing equivalent OC and control learning due to the engagement of explicit learning neural mechanisms in both groups.