Journal
CEREBRAL CORTEX
Volume 24, Issue 11, Pages 2859-2872Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bht138
Keywords
anxiety; categories and concepts; fear conditioning; functional magnetic resonance imaging; generalization
Categories
Funding
- NSF [0745919]
- NIH [R01 DA027802, F31 MH090682]
- Division Of Behavioral and Cognitive Sci
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie [0745919] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Experimental studies of conditioned learning reveal activity changes in the amygdala and unimodal sensory cortex underlying fear acquisition to simple stimuli. However, real-world fears typically involve complex stimuli represented at the category level. A consequence of category-level representations of threat is that aversive experiences with particular category members may lead one to infer that related exemplars likewise pose a threat, despite variations in physical form. Here, we examined the effect of category-level representations of threat on human brain activation using 2 superordinate categories (animals and tools) as conditioned stimuli. Hemodynamic activity in the amygdala and category-selective cortex was modulated by the reinforcement contingency, leading to widespread fear of different exemplars from the reinforced category. Multivariate representational similarity analyses revealed that activity patterns in the amygdala and object-selective cortex were more similar among exemplars from the threat versus safe category. Learning to fear animate objects was additionally characterized by enhanced functional coupling between the amygdala and fusiform gyrus. Finally, hippocampal activity co-varied with object typicality and amygdala activation early during training. These findings provide novel evidence that aversive learning can modulate category-level representations of object concepts, thereby enabling individuals to express fear to a range of related stimuli.
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