Abstract
Mental representations of stimuli are important for cognitive processes such as learning and decision-making. If mental representations become overly robust, it can lead to hallucinations and delusions, such as those exhibited in schizophrenia. In past research, mental representations and their use in cognitive processes has been studied in rodents by using a representation-mediated learning (RML) task using taste aversion. In this study, a human version of the RML task was conducted in which participants learned associations between visual and olfactory stimuli and rated their pleasantnesses. Participants then underwent an aversive conditioning period before being presented with and rating the stimuli again. The directly aversive learning involving the visual stimuli resulted in them being reported as less pleasant following the aversive conditioning. However, the mediated learning involving the olfactory stimuli did not show the same effect. This raises questions as to how mental representations and their strength are or are not able to influence human behavior.