Generalized "Stigma": Evidence for Devaluation-by-Inhibition Hypothesis from Implicit Learning

Recently, a new fundamental discovery has been made of the relationship between attentional system and affective system of human brain, giving rise to the devaluation-by-inhibition hypothesis. It is shown that selective attention has an affective impact on an otherwise emotionally bland stimulus. Particularly, if a neutral stimulus was inhibited by selective attention in a prior task, it would be valued less in a subsequent affective evaluation task than it would otherwise have been. In the present study, we extend this line of research on the affective consequence of attention and demonstrate that prior attentional states (attended or inhibited) associated with a group of neutral stimuli (character strings) can even influence subsequent preference judgment about previously-unseen stimuli if these new stimuli share certain basic features (e.g., follow the same rule) with those encountered in a previous stage.