Probing the role of perception in fear generalization
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Eva Ceulemans; Tom Beckers; Bram Vervliet; Jonas Zaman; Dieter Struyf
- Source
- Scientific Reports, Vol 9, Iss 1, Pp 1-8 (2019)
Scientific Reports
- Subject
- Male
0301 basic medicine
media_common.quotation_subject
lcsh:Medicine
Stimulus (physiology)
Brain mapping
Article
Generalization, Psychological
Young Adult
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Phenomenon
Perception
Human behaviour
Adaptation, Psychological
Conditioning, Psychological
Psychology
Humans
Fear conditioning
Situational ethics
lcsh:Science
media_common
Brain Mapping
Multidisciplinary
lcsh:R
Fear
030104 developmental biology
Perceptual decision
Female
lcsh:Q
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Cognitive psychology
- Language
- English
Behavior in novel situations is guided by similarities to previous experiences, a phenomenon known as generalization. Despite the widespread influence of generalization on healthy and pathological behavior, insight into the underlying mechanisms is lacking. It remains unclear whether a failure to notice situational changes contributes to the generalization of learned behavior. We combined a fear conditioning and generalization procedure with a perceptual decision task in humans and found that a failure to perceive a novel stimulus as different from the initial fear-evoking stimulus was associated with increased conditioned responding. These findings demonstrate the potential of a perception-centered approach to better understand (pathological) behavior and its underlying mechanism and are a promising avenue for the development of refined generalization protocols. ispartof: Scientific Reports vol:9 issue:1 pages:1-8 ispartof: location:England status: published