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…