scholarly journals Fear Generalization as Threat Prediction: Adaptive Changes in Facial Exploration Strategies revealed by Fixation-Pattern Similarity Analysis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lea Kampermann ◽  
Niklas Wilming ◽  
Arjen Alink ◽  
Christian Büchel ◽  
Selim Onat

AbstractAnimals can effortlessly adapt their behavior by generalizing from past experiences, and avoid harm in novel aversive situations. In our current understanding, the perceptual similarity between learning and generalization samples is viewed as one major factor driving aversive generalization. Alternatively, the threat-prediction account proposes that perceptual similarity should lead to generalization to the extent it predicts harmful outcomes. We tested these views using a two-dimensional perceptual continuum of faces. During learning, one face is conditioned to predict a harmful event, whereas the most dissimilar face stays neutral; introducing an adversity gradient defined only along one dimension. Learning changed the way how humans sampled information during viewing of faces. These occurred specifically along the adversity gradient leading to an increased dissimilarity of eye-movement patterns along the threat-related dimension. This provides evidence for the threat-prediction account of generalization, which conceives perceptual factors to be relevant to the extent they predict harmful outcomes.

eLife ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lea Kampermann ◽  
Niklas Wilming ◽  
Arjen Alink ◽  
Christian Büchel ◽  
Selim Onat

Animals can effortlessly adapt their behavior by generalizing from past aversive experiences, allowing to avoid harm in novel situations. We studied how visual information was sampled by eye-movements during this process called fear generalization, using faces organized along a circular two-dimensional perceptual continuum. During learning, one face was conditioned to predict a harmful event, whereas the most dissimilar face stayed neutral. This introduced an adversity gradient along one specific dimension, while the other, unspecific dimension was defined solely by perceptual similarity. Aversive learning changed scanning patterns selectively along the adversity-related dimension, but not the orthogonal dimension. This effect was mainly located within the eye region of faces. Our results provide evidence for adaptive changes in viewing strategies of faces following aversive learning. This is compatible with the view that these changes serve to sample information in a way that allows discriminating between safe and adverse for a better threat prediction.


2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (7) ◽  
pp. E1690-E1697 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oriel FeldmanHall ◽  
Joseph E. Dunsmoor ◽  
Alexa Tompary ◽  
Lindsay E. Hunter ◽  
Alexander Todorov ◽  
...  

How do humans learn to trust unfamiliar others? Decisions in the absence of direct knowledge rely on our ability to generalize from past experiences and are often shaped by the degree of similarity between prior experience and novel situations. Here, we leverage a stimulus generalization framework to examine how perceptual similarity between known individuals and unfamiliar strangers shapes social learning. In a behavioral study, subjects play an iterative trust game with three partners who exhibit highly trustworthy, somewhat trustworthy, or highly untrustworthy behavior. After learning who can be trusted, subjects select new partners for a second game. Unbeknownst to subjects, each potential new partner was parametrically morphed with one of the three original players. Results reveal that subjects prefer to play with strangers who implicitly resemble the original player they previously learned was trustworthy and avoid playing with strangers resembling the untrustworthy player. These decisions to trust or distrust strangers formed a generalization gradient that converged toward baseline as perceptual similarity to the original player diminished. In a second imaging experiment we replicate these behavioral gradients and leverage multivariate pattern similarity analyses to reveal that a tuning profile of activation patterns in the amygdala selectively captures increasing perceptions of untrustworthiness. We additionally observe that within the caudate adaptive choices to trust rely on neural activation patterns similar to those elicited when learning about unrelated, but perceptually familiar, individuals. Together, these findings suggest an associative learning mechanism efficiently deploys moral information encoded from past experiences to guide future choice.


Author(s):  
B. D. Athey ◽  
A. L. Stout ◽  
M. F. Smith ◽  
J. P. Langmore

Although there is general agreement that Inactive chromosome fibers consist of helically packed nucleosomes, the pattern of packing is still undetermined. Only one of the proposed models, the crossed-linker model, predicts a variable diameter dependent on the length of DNA between nucleosomes. Measurements of the fiber diameter of negatively-stained and frozen- hydrated- chromatin from Thyone sperm (87bp linker) and Necturus erythrocytes (48bp linker) have been previously reported from this laboratory. We now introduce a more reliable method of measuring the diameters of electron images of fibrous objects. The procedure uses a modified version of the computer program TOTAL, which takes a two-dimensional projection of the fiber density (represented by the micrograph itself) and projects it down the fiber axis onto one dimension. We illustrate this method using high contrast, in-focus STEM images of TMV and chromatin from Thyone and Necturus. The measured diameters are in quantitative agreement with the expected values for the crossed-linker model for chromatin structure


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan L. Benear ◽  
Elizabeth A. Horwath ◽  
Emily Cowan ◽  
M. Catalina Camacho ◽  
Chi Ngo ◽  
...  

The medial temporal lobe (MTL) undergoes critical developmental change throughout childhood, which aligns with developmental changes in episodic memory. We used representational similarity analysis to compare neural pattern similarity for children and adults in hippocampus and parahippocampal cortex during naturalistic viewing of clips from the same movie or different movies. Some movies were more familiar to participants than others. Neural pattern similarity was generally lower for clips from the same movie, indicating that related content taxes pattern separation-like processes. However, children showed this effect only for movies with which they were familiar, whereas adults showed the effect consistently. These data suggest that children need more exposures to stimuli in order to show mature pattern separation processes.


Atoms ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 53
Author(s):  
Jack C. Straton

Quantum theory is awash in multidimensional integrals that contain exponentials in the integration variables, their inverses, and inverse polynomials of those variables. The present paper introduces a means to reduce pairs of such integrals to one dimension when the integrand contains powers multiplied by an arbitrary function of xy/(x+y) multiplying various combinations of exponentials. In some cases these exponentials arise directly from transition-amplitudes involving products of plane waves, hydrogenic wave functions, and Yukawa and/or Coulomb potentials. In other cases these exponentials arise from Gaussian transforms of such functions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Maloney ◽  
Edward Witten

Abstract Recent developments involving JT gravity in two dimensions indicate that under some conditions, a gravitational path integral is dual to an average over an ensemble of boundary theories, rather than to a specific boundary theory. For an example in one dimension more, one would like to compare a random ensemble of two-dimensional CFT’s to Einstein gravity in three dimensions. But this is difficult. For a simpler problem, here we average over Narain’s family of two-dimensional CFT’s obtained by toroidal compactification. These theories are believed to be the most general ones with their central charges and abelian current algebra symmetries, so averaging over them means picking a random CFT with those properties. The average can be computed using the Siegel-Weil formula of number theory and has some properties suggestive of a bulk dual theory that would be an exotic theory of gravity in three dimensions. The bulk dual theory would be more like U(1)2D Chern-Simons theory than like Einstein gravity.


2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Lombardo

This Clinical Q&A section responds to a question about organizing a client’s historical information into a targeting sequence within a treatment plan that is consistent with Shapiro’s (2001) three-pronged protocol. The procedures for identifying and prioritizing treatment eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) targets are reviewed in the context of Shapiro’s theoretical model, and various time line models are summarized. The author then presents her EMDR TargetTime Line, which provides a practical simple visual tool for documenting past, present, and future aspects of the presenting problem. It allows the therapist to note if disturbing past experiences present around a core theme, such as negative cognitions, physical symptoms, or situations/persons/circumstances. Three clinical cases are used to illustrate the form’s application with various types of treatment targets.


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