Fear in the Theater of the Mind: Differential Fear Conditioning With Imagined Stimuli
通过三个实验发现，年轻人在看到或想象刺激时都能习得差异性恐惧条件化，且这种学习能在视觉感知和想象之间相互转移，表明想象与感知共享学习机制，为焦虑障碍机制提供新见解。
Many symptoms of anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder are elicited by fearful mental imagery. Yet little is known about how visual imagery of conditioned stimuli (CSs) affects the acquisition of differential fear conditioning. Across three experiments with younger human adults (Experiment 1: n = 33, Experiment 2: n = 27, Experiment 3: n = 26), we observed that participants acquired differential fear conditioning to both viewed and imagined percepts serving as the CSs, as measured via self-reported fear and skin conductance responses. Additionally, this differential conditioning generalized across CS-percept modalities such that differential conditioning acquired in response to visual percepts generalized to the corresponding imagined percepts and vice versa. This is novel evidence that perceived and imagined stimuli engage learning processes in very similar ways and is consistent with the theory that mental imagery is depictive and recruits neural resources shared with visual perception. Our findings also provide new insight into the mechanisms of anxiety and related disorders.