Social cognitive and affective neuroscience
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Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci · Sep 2011
Influence of contingency awareness on neural, electrodermal and evaluative responses during fear conditioning.
In an fMRI study, effects of contingency awareness on conditioned responses were assessed in three groups comprising 118 subjects. A differential fear-conditioning paradigm with visual conditioned stimuli, an electrical unconditioned stimulus and two distractors was applied. The instructed aware group was informed about the contingencies, whereas the distractors prevented contingency detection in the unaware group. ⋯ The orbitofrontal cortex showed varying response patterns: lateral structures showed higher responses in instructed aware than unaware subjects, the opposite was true for medial parts. Conditioned subjective and electrodermal responses emerged only in the two aware groups. These results confirm the independence of conditioned amygdala responses from contingency awareness and indicate specific neural circuits for different aspects of fear acquisition in unaware, learned aware and instructed aware subjects.