New buzzwords - early cortical responses to pseudo words after affective conditioning

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event New buzzwords - early cortical responses to pseudo words after affective conditioning Magdalene Ortmann1*, Christian Dobel1, Johanna Kissler2 and Markus Junghöfer1 1 University of Münster, Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis, Germany 2 University of Konstanz, Institute for Clinical Psychology, Germany Emotional compared to neutral words receive preferential processing at visual sensory cortex regions starting already at 200ms [1]. Convergent effects have been shown for various kinds of emotional visual stimuli and are assumed to reflect motivated attention leading to top-down re-entrant modulation of sensory processing. Using associative learning with a multitude of different faces we have recently been able to show that aversively conditioned faces evoke motivated attention and convergent correlates of amplified sensory processing beginning around 130ms and even in absence of contingency awareness [2]. Additionally we found preferential sensory CS+ processing already before 100ms supporting two-pathway models as for instance suggested by LeDoux [3,“low road – high road”] or Bullier [4, “fast brain”]. Here we aimed to investigate whether this rapid and implicit emotional learning occurs also for words and whether magnetoencephalographic correlates can support the idea that rapid “low road” or ‘fast brain” processing is a general phenomenon and not limited to biological stimuli. 52 pseudo words were paired three times each with one of 52 pictures depicting aversive or neutral objects (shark, bottle, etc.). Comparison of event related fields to pseudo word presentation before and after learning confirmed our hypotheses, showing enhanced sensory activity for aversively conditioned pseudo-words after learning at an early (“low road”) and a mid-latency (“high road”) interval of information processing. These results were supported by behavioral tests showing significant effects of emotional content even in the absence of contingency awareness.