The impact of previously learned feature-relevance on generalisation of conditioned fear in humans

摘要

Background and objectives: Excessive generalisation of fear learning has recently been implicated in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders such as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Evidence is growing to suggest that cognitive processes such as rule-abstraction may be involved in fear generalization. In a study by Vervliet et al. (2010), verbal instructions regarding the relevance of stimulus colour or shape for predicting the delivery of an electric shock led to greater generalisation of fear to novel stimuli which contained the instruction-relevant feature. Here, we examined the impact of pre-training rather than instructing feature relevance.