How Does Not Responding to Appetitive Stimuli Cause Devaluation: Evaluative Conditioning or Response Inhibition?

To examine this question, a go/no-go task was employed in which appetitive stimuli were consistently associated with cues to respond (go stimuli), or with cues to not respond (either no-go cues or the absence of cues; no-go stimuli). Change in evaluation of go and no-go stimuli was compared to stimuli not presented in the task (untrained stimuli).

Overall, the results suggest that devaluation of appetitive stimuli by not responding to them is the result of response inhibition. In these experiments we recruited a total of 272 participants via the Sona participation system at Radboud University. The experiments were conducted from November 2014 to September 2015.