Awareness is essential for differential delay eyeblink conditioning with soft-tone but not loud-tone conditioned stimuli.

The role of awareness in differential delay eyeblink conditioning (DEC) remains controversial. Here, we investigated the involvement of awareness in differential DEC with a soft or a loud tone as the conditioned stimulus (CS). In the experiment, 36 participants were trained in differential DEC with a soft tone (60 dB) or a loud tone (85 dB) as the CS, paired with a corneal air-puff as the unconditioned stimulus (US). After conditioning, awareness of the relationship between the CS and the US was assessed with a 17-item true/false questionnaire. Interestingly, during differential DEC with a soft-tone CS, a higher proportion of differential conditioned responses (CRs) was evident in participants who were aware than those who were unaware. In contrast, when a loud tone was used as the CS, the proportion of differential CRs of the aware participants did not differ significantly from those who were unaware over any of the blocks of 20 trials. In unaware participants, the percentage of differential CRs with a loud-tone CS was significantly higher than that with a soft-tone CS; however in participants classified as aware, the percentage of differential CRs with a loud-tone CS did not differ significantly from that with a soft-tone CS. The present findings suggest that awareness is critical for differential DEC when the delay task is rendered more difficult.