Perruchet Effect

The Perruchet effect is a psychological phenomenon in which a person's conscious expectation that an event will occur becomes dissociated from the strength or speed of their physiological or behavioral response to that event. It is demonstrated through sequential analysis of consecutive conditioning trials, such as eyeblink conditioning, electrodermal shock conditioning, or a cued go or no go task, and it is named after Pierre Perruchet, who proposed a conditioning paradigm to separate two mechanisms thought to underlie associative learning: an automatic strengthening of the association between two repeatedly paired events, and a separate process of conscious reasoning about the relationship between those events based on how they have been sequenced. The effect is considered one of the strongest pieces of evidence for a dual process model of associative learning, since it works against the view that a person's conscious inferences about how two events relate are simply a byproduct of their conditioned responses.