Learning
Can you learn to fear something you only imagine?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People learned to fear a simple pattern they only imagined when imagining it was paired with a shock, and that fear carried over to seeing the pattern, and vice versa.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Within-subjects differential fear conditioning with Gabor patches as CS+ and CS-, where participants were cued to view or imagine each patch and mild shock was paired with either viewing or imagining the CS+; Experiments 2 and 3 removed the auditory cue from view trials
- N
- Analysed samples: 33 in Experiment 1 (both phases), 27 in Experiment 2 (visual acquisition only), 26 in Experiment 3 (imagery acquisition only), after removing shock nonresponders and noisy recordings
- Population
- Healthy college-age adults, mostly women, recruited from a university participant pool
- Outcome
- Self-reported fear of shock per trial type (1-7 scale) and skin conductance responses (SCR) to CS+ versus CS-
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Key findings
Fear acquired to a viewed pattern transferred to imagining that same pattern, shown in fear ratings in Experiments 1 and 2 and in skin conductance in Experiment 1. Fear could be conditioned directly to an imagined pattern in both Experiments 1 and 3, and these were the largest effects in the study. Fear acquired through imagery transferred to viewing the pattern in self-report in Experiments 1 and 3 and in skin conductance in Experiment 3, but in Experiment 1 only for the 22 people who had clearly acquired imagined fear. Responses were always strongest for whichever modality had actually been paired with shock.
Methodology
Participants were cued on each trial to either look at or imagine one of two striped patterns (Gabor patches). In a visual-acquisition phase, viewing one pattern (the CS+) was sometimes followed by a mild electric shock; in an imagery-acquisition phase, imagining the CS+ was sometimes shocked instead. Fear was measured with sweat-gland skin conductance responses on each trial and with fear ratings after each phase. Experiments 2 and 3 repeated each phase separately with no audio cue before view trials, to rule out conditioning to the spoken instruction.
Limitations
Several generalisation effects were weak or absent in skin conductance: in Experiment 2, the imagined CS+ did not produce reliably larger responses than the imagined CS-, and Bayesian evidence there favoured no effect. The authors cannot fully rule out that people learned a verbal rule about which pattern predicted shock rather than a picture-like mental image. Stimuli were simple striped patches and participants were young college students, so it is unknown whether the effects hold for complex objects, older adults or people with anxiety disorders. The analyses were not preregistered, and 6 to 12 participants per experiment were excluded for not responding to shock or noisy recordings.
How this study connects
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