Neural indices of orienting, discrimination, and conflict monitoring after contextual fear and safety learning
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Neural indices of orienting, discrimination, and conflict monitoring after contextual fear and safety learning Danielle L. Taylor 1,2 & DeMond M. Grant 1 & Kristen E. Frosio 1 & Jacob D. Kraft 1 & Kaitlyn M. Nagel 1 & Danielle E. Deros 1 & Evan J. White 3
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Investigations of fear conditioning have recently begun to evaluate contextual factors that affect attention-related processes. However, much of the extant literature does not evaluate how contextual fear learning influences neural indicators of attentional processes during goal-directed activity. The current study evaluated how early attention for task-relevant stimuli and conflict monitoring were affected when presented within task-irrelevant safety and threat contexts after fear learning. Participants (N = 72) completed a Flanker task with modified context before and after context-dependent fear learning. Flanker stimuli were presented in the same threat and safety contexts utilized in the fear learning task while EEG was collected. Results indicated increased early attention (N1) to flankers appearing in threat contexts and later increased neural indicators (P2) of attention to flankers appearing in safety contexts. Results of this study indicate that contextual fear learning modulates early attentional processes for taskrelevant stimuli that appear in the context of safety and threat. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed. Keywords Event-related potential . Anxiety . Attention
Pavlovian fear-conditioning has been widely investigated through animal and human models, and from a clinical perspective, fear-conditioning principles are linked to anxiety disorders, including specific phobia, social anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and others (see Lissek et al., 2005). Investigating fear-conditioning among human populations has elucidated processes related to symptom onset and maintenance (Craske, Hermans, & Vansteenwegen, 2006; Mineka & Zinbarg, 2006), as well as how attentional functioning is influenced by these anxiety symptoms (Aue & Okon-Singer, 2015; Britton, Lissek, Grillon, Norcross, & Pine, 2011). Empirical investigation of context-dependent fear conditioning has found that trait anxiety is associated with difficulties utilizing environmental safety cues to inhibit conditioned fear responses during periods of explicit safety (Haaker et al., 2015). This research suggests that deficiencies
* Danielle L. Taylor [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA
2
Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center, Charleston, SC, USA
3
Laureate Institute for Brain Research, Tulsa, OK, USA
in adaptive fear inhibition may be a potential transdiagnostic factor, thus warranting further investigation. Studies have evaluated the effects of context-dependent fear learning on attentional processes during associative fear learning paradigms (Haaker et al., 2015; Lonsdorf et al. 2015), elucidating how contextual fear influences neural indicators linke
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