Ehlers Mana R, Kryklywy James H, Beukers Andre O, Moore Sarah R, Forys Brandon J, Anderson Adam K, Todd Rebecca M
Faculty of Psychology and Sport Science, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Imaging Neurosci (Camb). 2024 Oct 17;2. doi: 10.1162/imag_a_00320. eCollection 2024.
Learning which stimuli in our environment co-occur with painful or pleasurable events is critical for survival. Previous research has established the basic neural and behavioral mechanisms of aversive and appetitive conditioning; however, it is unclear precisely what information content is learned. Here we examined the degree to which aspects of the unconditioned stimulus (US)-sensory information versus affective salience-are transferred to the conditioned stimulus (CS). To decode what stimuli features (e.g., valence vs. discriminative somatosensation) are represented in patterns of brain activation elicited during appetitive (soft touch) and aversive (painful touch) conditioning to faces, a novel approach to using modeling with representational similarity analysis (RSA) based on theoretically driven representational patterns of interest (POIs) was applied to fMRI data. Once associations were learned through conditioning, globally, the CS reactivated US representational patterns showing conditioning-dependent reactivation in specific high-order brain regions: In the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, the CS reactivated patterns associated with the affective salience of the US-suggesting that, with affective conditioning, these regions carry forward the affective associations of the experience.
了解我们环境中的哪些刺激与痛苦或愉悦事件同时出现对生存至关重要。先前的研究已经确立了厌恶和奖赏性条件作用的基本神经和行为机制；然而，尚不清楚具体学到了什么信息内容。在这里，我们研究了无条件刺激（US）的感觉信息与情感显著性方面被转移到条件刺激（CS）的程度。为了解码在对脸部进行奖赏性（轻柔触摸）和厌恶（疼痛触摸）条件作用期间引发的大脑激活模式中所呈现的刺激特征（例如，效价与辨别性躯体感觉），一种基于理论驱动的感兴趣表征模式（POI）使用表征相似性分析（RSA）进行建模的新方法被应用于功能磁共振成像（fMRI）数据。一旦通过条件作用学习到关联，总体而言，CS会重新激活US表征模式，在特定的高阶脑区显示出依赖于条件作用的重新激活：在背侧前扣带回皮层，CS重新激活了与US的情感显著性相关的模式——这表明，通过情感条件作用，这些区域传递了体验的情感关联。
