Contributed Talk Sessions | Poster Sessions | All Posters | Search Papers

Poster Session B: Wednesday, August 13, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Preliminary evidence indicates that selective maintenance of adverse events may explain conditioning phenomena attributed to fear generalization

Deepta Chandrasekhar¹, Isabel M Berwian¹; ¹Princeton University

Presenter: Deepta Chandrasekhar

Understanding how fear memories are maintained over time is crucial for improving the effectiveness of anxiety treatments. Previous work suggests that fear generalizes over time from the stimuli associated with aversive events to other, similar, stimuli, and that such stimuli are remembered better due to their association with potential aversive events. At the same time, a recent model showed that memory maintenance that is specific to the feared stimuli can explain phenomena such as why a fear response that is extinguished sometimes returns over time. Here, we test the prediction of this model that memory will be better for the specific stimuli associated with aversive events, and not for similar stimuli that were not followed by an aversive event. N=441 participants completed an online-administered fear-conditioning task with trial-unique stimuli from two categories (animals and objects) and a subsequent surprise recognition memory test. Preliminary results indicate that participants had better memory for the category of stimuli associated with aversive events compared to the stimulus category that was not associated with an aversive event. However, this effect was mainly driven by memory of the specific stimuli from trials with the aversive event. These results support the idea that memories in this paradigm are primarily organized according to emotional rather than semantic similarity, as has been shown in other domains as well.

Topic Area: Reward, Value & Social Decision Making

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF