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Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Evidence of fear conditioning in virtual reality revealed by eye movements

Catherine Kim¹, Veronica Lennon, Dhwani Shah, Temidayo Orederu, Daniela Schiller¹, Angela Radulescu¹; ¹Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Presenter: Catherine Kim

Understanding how humans form associations between outcomes and environmental cues is well studied, but it is not clear how these associations are learned in real-world settings. Virtual reality (VR) provides a robust and ecologically valid platform for investigating contextual influences on learning, memory, and emotion. In this study, we use VR to study contextual fear conditioning. We conducted an integrated VR and eye-tracking study with 11 adults. To understand the effect of fear conditioning on behavior and emotional state, we analyzed gaze fixation data and self-report ratings of valence and arousal. We trained a long short-term memory (LSTM) classifier to differentiate responses to conditioned and neutral stimuli. We found that participants exhibited significantly higher gaze concentration on conditioned stimuli compared to neutral stimuli, demonstrating an enhanced emotional engagement in the fear-inducing virtual environments. Furthermore, the LSTM model not only successfully differentiated between fear and neutral conditions with high accuracy, but also revealed different patterns of fear generalization between pre- and post- fear session.

Topic Area: Memory, Spatial Cognition & Skill Learning

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