Abstract
Mental imagery is an important tool in the cognitive control of emotion. The present study tests the prediction that visual imagery can generate and regulate differential fear conditioning via the activation and prioritization of stimulus representations in early visual cortices. We combined differential fear conditioning with manipulations of viewing and imagining basic visual stimuli in humans. We discovered that mental imagery of a fear-conditioned stimulus compared to imagery of a safe conditioned stimulus generated a significantly greater conditioned response as measured by self-reported fear, the skin conductance response, and right anterior insula activity (experiment 1). Moreover, mental imagery effectively down- and up-regulated the fear conditioned responses (experiment 2). Multivariate classification using the functional magnetic resonance imaging data from retinotopically defined early visual regions revealed significant decoding of the imagined stimuli in V2 and V3 (experiment 1) but significantly reduced decoding in these regions during imagery-based regulation (experiment 2). Together, the present findings indicate that mental imagery can generate and regulate a differential fear conditioned response via mechanisms of the depictive theory of imagery and the biased-competition theory of attention. These findings also highlight the potential importance of mental imagery in the manifestation and treatment of psychological illnesses.
Highlights
Mental imagery is an important tool in the cognitive control of emotion
While much research in human and non-human animals has emphasized the role of the amygdala in the acquisition of differential fear conditioning[15–22], a recent meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging studies found that a network that includes both cortical and subcortical regions but not the amygdala is reliably activated by differential fear c onditioning[6]
Using multivariate cross-classification (MVCC) to test our second hypothesis we found significant decoding during mental imagery trials in V2, V3 and V4-V3AB, though in V2 and V3 the decoding accuracy was greater for viewed than imagined stimuli, which is consistent with previous research[33,63]
Summary
Mental imagery is an important tool in the cognitive control of emotion. The present study tests the prediction that visual imagery can generate and regulate differential fear conditioning via the activation and prioritization of stimulus representations in early visual cortices. While much research in human and non-human animals has emphasized the role of the amygdala in the acquisition of differential fear conditioning[15–22], a recent meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies found that a network that includes both cortical and subcortical regions but not the amygdala is reliably activated by differential fear c onditioning[6]. This putative fear network includes bilateral aspects of the anterior insula (aIn), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), ventral striatum, thalamus, and midbrain structures. With the expression and regulation of differential conditioning rather than the mechanisms of acquisition, we prioritized the aIn and dmPFC in the univariate brain analyses
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