Zhu Jialin, Yang Yi, Chen Lihong, Luo Wenbo
Institute of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian 116029, China.
Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Dalian, Liaoning Province 116029, China.
iScience. 2025 Jul 14;28(8):113125. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2025.113125. eCollection 2025 Aug 15.
Emotion-perception interaction is a fundamental question in cognitive neuroscience, yet the underlying neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here, we probed this issue by combining fear conditioning paradigm with the classic Ebbinghaus illusion. We associated the surrounding context of the Ebbinghaus illusion with aversive stimuli (electric shock or intense noise) and measured behavioral and neural responses. Behaviorally, aversively conditioned contexts enhanced the perceived size illusion effect, with shock producing a stronger conditioning effect than noise. Neuroimaging revealed distinct neural pathways mediating these effects: shock conditioning strengthened occipital-to-parietal connectivity, while noise conditioning enhanced prefrontal-to-parietal connectivity. Moreover, noise relative to shock conditioning elicited greater activation in both the lateral amygdala (LA) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), and weakened LA-to-dlPFC connectivity. The findings suggest that aversive learning experiences shape human visual perception through stimulus-specific neural networks, advancing our understanding of emotion-perception interaction, and providing crucial insights for clinical interventions targeting fear-related perceptual distortions.
情绪-感知交互是认知神经科学中的一个基本问题，但其潜在的神经机制仍知之甚少。在这里，我们通过将恐惧条件范式与经典的艾宾浩斯错觉相结合来探究这个问题。我们将艾宾浩斯错觉的周围背景与厌恶刺激（电击或强烈噪音）联系起来，并测量行为和神经反应。在行为上，厌恶条件化的背景增强了感知到的大小错觉效应，电击产生的条件化效应比噪音更强。神经影像学揭示了介导这些效应的不同神经通路：电击条件化增强了枕叶到顶叶的连接，而噪音条件化增强了前额叶到顶叶的连接。此外，相对于电击条件化，噪音在外侧杏仁核（LA）和背外侧前额叶皮层（dlPFC）中都引起了更大的激活，并削弱了LA到dlPFC的连接。这些发现表明，厌恶学习经历通过特定刺激的神经网络塑造人类视觉感知，推进了我们对情绪-感知交互的理解，并为针对恐惧相关感知扭曲的临床干预提供了关键见解。
