Cognitive NeuroscienceNeural, electrodermal and behavioral response patterns in contingency aware and unaware subjects during a picture–picture conditioning paradigm
Section snippets
Subjects
A total of 32 subjects (18 females) with a mean age of 23.26 years (S.D.=3.90) participated in the study. All participants were right-handed and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. None of the subjects had a history of psychiatric or neurological disorders. The majority were students, who responded to announcements posted at the campus of the University of Giessen. Participants were informed about the procedure in general (but not the conditioning paradigm until the experiment was
Contingency awareness
One principal aim was to investigate the influence of contingency awareness on SCRs, valence ratings and neural activity. A somewhat surprising finding was that a total of 18 participants (10 female; 8 male) did not recognize the association between CS and UCS (all chose the answer “d” in both cases). Fourteen participants (eight female; six male) could be classified as “aware.” All aware subjects chose answer “c” (“Before the aversive pictures, there was never a picture of a rhomb/of a
Discussion
The present study investigated CRs using aversive pictures as UCS in a differential fear conditioning paradigm. We assessed three different response systems: (1) subjective ratings, (2) SCRs and (3) BOLD responses as indicators of emotional learning. As the main finding, contingency aware and unaware subjects showed different conditioned reactions with respect to the response systems. Furthermore, we found increased NAcc activation to the CS+ in contingency aware subjects.
In detail, significant
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the DFG Graduiertenkolleg GRK 885 “NeuroAct.”
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