Attitudinal Effects of Stimulus Co-occurrence and Stimulus Relations: Paradoxical Effects of Cognitive Load

Research suggests that evaluations of an object can be jointly influenced by (a) the mere co-occurrence of the object with a pleasant or unpleasant stimulus (e.g., mere co-occurrence of object A and negative event B) and (b) the object's specific relation to the co-occurring stimulus (e.g., object A starts vs. stops negative event B). Three experiments investigated the impact of cognitive load during learning on the effects of stimulus co-occurrence and stimulus relations. Counter to the shared prediction of competing theories suggesting that effects of stimulus relations should be reduced by cognitive load during learning, effects of stimulus relations were greater (rather than smaller) under high-load compared with low-load conditions. Effects of stimulus co-occurrence were not significantly affected by cognitive load. The results are discussed in terms of theories suggesting that cognitive load can influence behavioral outcomes via strategic shifts in resource allocation in response to task-specific affordances.