Pattern analyses reveal separate experience-based fear memories in the human right Amygdala
Learning fear via the experience of contingencies between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US) is often assumed to be fundamentally different from learning fear via instructions. An open question is whether fear-related brain areas respond differently to experienced CS–US contingencies than to merely instructed CS–US contingencies. Here, we contrasted two experimental conditions where subjects were instructed to expect the same CS–US contingencies while only one condition was characterized by prior experience with the CS–US contingency. Using multivoxel pattern analysis of fMRI data, we found CS-related neural activation patterns in the right amygdala (but…
Fear expression and return of fear following threat instruction with or without direct contingency experience
Prior research showed that mere instructions about the contingency between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an unconditioned stimulus (US) can generate fear reactions to the CS. Little is known, however, about the extent to which actual CS-US contingency experience adds anything beyond the effect of contingency instructions. Our results extend previous studies on this topic in that it included fear potentiated startle as an additional dependent variable and examined return of fear (ROF) following reinstatement. We observed that CS-US pairings can enhance fear reactions beyond the effect of contingency instructions. Moreover, for all measures of fear, instructions elicited immediate fear reac…
Interference in Dutch–French Bilinguals : Stimulus and Response Conflict in Intra- and Interlingual Stroop
Abstract. In the present manuscript, we investigate the source of congruency effects in a group of Dutch–French bilinguals. In particular, participants performed a color-identification Stroop task, in which both (first language) Dutch and (second language) French distracting color words were presented in colors. The typical finding is impaired responding when the word and color are incongruent (e.g., “red” in blue) relative to congruent (e.g., “red” in red). This congruency effect is observed for both first and second language distracting color words. The current experiment used a 2-to-1 keypress mapping manipulation, which allows one to separate stimulus conflict (i.e., conflict between w…