Summary Of Fear Conditioning

Summary The authors of this article talks about a study in which they did on human fear conditioning through neuroimaging. They evaluated the brain activity under numerous mixture rates between conditioned and unconditioned stimulus. An introduction of an attentional-associative that house emotional fear or fear memory. The anterior cingulate cortex may be part of the development of fear which includes traces of the fear memory. The activity in the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex signifies the prediction of the unconditioned stimulus. While the activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and insula model was introduced by Schmajuk, Lam and Gray through computer simulations. This showed the activity in the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex. The amygdala is a critical region of the brain captured by a variable coding the attention modulated illustration of conditioned stimuli. The model explains how variables control behavior, and provides a clear outline in how the variables play a key role in the explanation of several predictable conditioning illustrations. This model also offers a number of calculations related to the stimulus innovation for future neuroimaging studies that is connected to associative learning.

One of the examples given in the chapter was a child that feared the dark. The scientist associated the nightmares that the child had with the dark. They came to this conclusion that even though the child may take naps during the day it is most likely that the child has night mares at night. The child will start to think that every time it is dark that they will have a nightmare. Therefore, this will lead to the child being afraid of the dark altogether. “The child who has nightmares may refuse to enter any dark area of the house” (Salkind, 2004, p.167) this is called generalization which occurs when a similar factor is associated with