Browse
Submit Data
Databases
API
Help

Dataset Information

0 Views

0 Connections

0 Citations

0 Reanalyses

0 Downloads

Omics score: 0

I Think, Therefore Eyeblink: The Importance of Contingency Awareness in Conditioning.

ABSTRACT: Can conditioning occur without conscious awareness of the contingency between the stimuli? We trained participants on two separate reaction time tasks that ensured attention to the experimental stimuli. The tasks were then interleaved to create a differential Pavlovian contingency between visual stimuli from one task and an airpuff stimulus from the other. Many participants were unaware of the contingency and failed to show differential eyeblink conditioning, despite attending to a salient stimulus that was contingently and contiguously related to the airpuff stimulus over many trials. Manipulation of awareness by verbal instruction dramatically increased awareness and differential eyeblink responding. These findings cast doubt on dual-system theories, which propose an automatic associative system independent of cognition, and provide strong evidence that cognitive processes associated with awareness play a causal role in learning.

SUBMITTER: Weidemann G

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4831030 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Json Xml

Publications

I Think, Therefore Eyeblink: The Importance of Contingency Awareness in Conditioning.

Weidemann Gabrielle G Satkunarajah Michelle M Lovibond Peter F PF

Psychological science 20160223 4

Can conditioning occur without conscious awareness of the contingency between the stimuli? We trained participants on two separate reaction time tasks that ensured attention to the experimental stimuli. The tasks were then interleaved to create a differential Pavlovian contingency between visual stimuli from one task and an airpuff stimulus from the other. Many participants were unaware of the contingency and failed to show differential eyeblink conditioning, despite attending to a salient stimu ...[more]

PMID: 26905277

Similar Datasets

Awareness and differential eyeblink conditioning: effects of manipulating auditory CS frequencies.

Project description:The role of awareness in differential delay eyeblink conditioning (EBC) has been a topic of much debate. We tested the idea that awareness is required for differential delay EBC when two cues are perceptually similar. The present study manipulated frequencies of auditory conditioned stimuli (CS) to vary CS similarity in three groups of participants. Our findings indicate that awareness was not necessary for differential delay EBC when two tones are easily discriminable, awareness was also not needed for relatively similar tones but may facilitate earlier conditioning, and awareness alone was not sufficient for differential delay EBC.

| S-EPMC6970424 | biostudies-literature

Influence of contingency awareness on neural, electrodermal and evaluative responses during fear conditioning.

Project description:In an fMRI study, effects of contingency awareness on conditioned responses were assessed in three groups comprising 118 subjects. A differential fear-conditioning paradigm with visual conditioned stimuli, an electrical unconditioned stimulus and two distractors was applied. The instructed aware group was informed about the contingencies, whereas the distractors prevented contingency detection in the unaware group. The third group (learned aware) was not informed about the contingencies, but learned them despite the distractors. Main effects of contingency awareness on conditioned responses emerged in several brain structures. Post hoc tests revealed differential dorsal anterior cingulate, insula and ventral striatum responses in aware conditioning only, whereas the amygdala was activated independent of contingency awareness. Differential responses of the hippocampus were specifically observed in learned aware subjects, indicating a role in the development of contingency awareness. The orbitofrontal cortex showed varying response patterns: lateral structures showed higher responses in instructed aware than unaware subjects, the opposite was true for medial parts. Conditioned subjective and electrodermal responses emerged only in the two aware groups. These results confirm the independence of conditioned amygdala responses from contingency awareness and indicate specific neural circuits for different aspects of fear acquisition in unaware, learned aware and instructed aware subjects.

| S-EPMC3150860 | biostudies-other

Awareness is essential for differential delay eyeblink conditioning with soft-tone but not loud-tone conditioned stimuli.

Project description:The role of awareness in differential delay eyeblink conditioning (DEC) remains controversial. Here, we investigated the involvement of awareness in differential DEC with a soft or a loud tone as the conditioned stimulus (CS). In the experiment, 36 participants were trained in differential DEC with a soft tone (60 dB) or a loud tone (85 dB) as the CS, paired with a corneal air-puff as the unconditioned stimulus (US). After conditioning, awareness of the relationship between the CS and the US was assessed with a 17-item true/false questionnaire. Interestingly, during differential DEC with a soft-tone CS, a higher proportion of differential conditioned responses (CRs) was evident in participants who were aware than those who were unaware. In contrast, when a loud tone was used as the CS, the proportion of differential CRs of the aware participants did not differ significantly from those who were unaware over any of the blocks of 20 trials. In unaware participants, the percentage of differential CRs with a loud-tone CS was significantly higher than that with a soft-tone CS; however in participants classified as aware, the percentage of differential CRs with a loud-tone CS did not differ significantly from that with a soft-tone CS. The present findings suggest that awareness is critical for differential DEC when the delay task is rendered more difficult.

| S-EPMC5562602 | biostudies-other

Performance in eyeblink conditioning is age and sex dependent.

Project description:A growing body of evidence suggests that the cerebellum is involved in both cognition and language. Abnormal cerebellar development may contribute to neurodevelopmental disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, fetal alcohol syndrome, dyslexia, and specific language impairment. Performance in eyeblink conditioning, which depends on the cerebellum, can potentially be used to clarify the neural mechanisms underlying the cerebellar dysfunction in disorders like these. However, we must first understand how the performance develops in children who do not have a disorder. In this study we assessed the performance in eyeblink conditioning in 42 typically developing children between 6 and 11 years old as well as in 26 adults. Older children produced more conditioned eyeblink responses than younger children and adults produced more than children. In addition, females produced more conditioned eyeblink responses than males among both children and adults. These results highlight the importance of considering the influence of age and sex on the performance when studying eyeblink conditioning as a measure of cerebellar development.

| S-EPMC5436819 | biostudies-literature

Neural substrates underlying human delay and trace eyeblink conditioning.

Project description:Classical conditioning paradigms, such as trace conditioning, in which a silent period elapses between the offset of the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the delivery of the unconditioned stimulus (US), and delay conditioning, in which the CS and US coterminate, are widely used to study the neural substrates of associative learning. However, there are significant gaps in our knowledge of the neural systems underlying conditioning in humans. For example, evidence from animal and human patient research suggests that the hippocampus plays a critical role during trace eyeblink conditioning, but there is no evidence to date in humans that the hippocampus is active during trace eyeblink conditioning or is differentially responsive to delay and trace paradigms. The present work provides a direct comparison of the neural correlates of human delay and trace eyeblink conditioning by using functional MRI. Behavioral results showed that humans can learn both delay and trace conditioning in parallel. Comparable delay and trace activation was measured in the cerebellum, whereas greater hippocampal activity was detected during trace compared with delay conditioning. These findings further support the position that the cerebellum is involved in both delay and trace eyeblink conditioning whereas the hippocampus is critical for trace eyeblink conditioning. These results also suggest that the neural circuitry supporting delay and trace eyeblink classical conditioning in humans and laboratory animals may be functionally similar.

| S-EPMC2430367 | biostudies-literature

Sleep deprivation directly following eyeblink-conditioning impairs memory consolidation.

Project description:The relation between sleep and different forms of memory formation continues to be a relevant topic in our daily life. Sleep has been found to affect cerebellum-dependent procedural memory formation, but it remains to be elucidated to what extent the level of sleep deprivation directly after motor training also influences our ability to store and retrieve memories. Here, we studied the effect of disturbed sleep in mice during two different time-windows, one covering the first four hours following eyeblink conditioning (EBC) and another window following the next period of four hours. Compared to control mice with sleep ad libitum, the percentage of conditioned responses and their amplitude were impaired when mice were deprived of sleep directly after conditioning. This impairment was still significant when the learned EBC responses were extinguished and later reacquired. However, consolidation of eyeblink responses was not affected when mice were deprived later than four hours after acquisition, not even when tested during a different day-night cycle for control. Moreover, mice that slept longer directly following EBC showed a tendency for more conditioned responses. Our data indicate that consolidation of motor memories can benefit from sleep directly following memory formation.

| S-EPMC7184677 | biostudies-literature

Caudate nucleus is critically involved in trace eyeblink conditioning.

Project description:The basal ganglia are a collection of brain regions involved with motor planning and initiation. The major site of cortical and thalamic input into the basal ganglia network is the striatum, which includes a differentiated caudate nucleus (CN) and the putamen in rabbits. Trace eyeblink conditioning (EBC) is a forebrain-dependent associative learning task in which a stimulus-free time interval separates the presentation of a behaviorally neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) and a behaviorally salient unconditioned stimulus. We investigated whether the CN is essential for acquisition of trace EBC and whether learning-related changes in neuronal activity occur in the caudate nucleus during trace EBC. Bilateral lesions of the CN in rabbits prevent acquisition of trace EBC. In separate cohorts of rabbits, single-unit recordings showed that medium spiny neurons from regions shown to be critical by lesions display strong responses to the CS, especially in the initial days of training before acquisition. Cholinergic interneurons, or tonically active neurons, become responsive to the CS and show dramatic firing rate changes during the trace interval after learning criterion has been met. These data demonstrate that the CN is required for and involved in trace EBC.

| S-EPMC2801406 | biostudies-other

Hippocampal Interneurons are Required for Trace Eyeblink Conditioning in Mice.

Project description:While the hippocampus has been implicated in supporting the association among time-separated events, the underlying cellular mechanisms have not been fully clarified. Here, we combined in vivo multi-channel recording and optogenetics to investigate the activity of hippocampal interneurons in freely-moving mice performing a trace eyeblink conditioning (tEBC) task. We found that the hippocampal interneurons exhibited conditioned stimulus (CS)-evoked sustained activity, which predicted the performance of conditioned eyeblink responses (CRs) in the early acquisition of the tEBC. Consistent with this, greater proportions of hippocampal pyramidal cells showed CS-evoked decreased activity in the early acquisition of the tEBC. Moreover, optogenetic suppression of the sustained activity in hippocampal interneurons severely impaired acquisition of the tEBC. In contrast, suppression of the sustained activity of hippocampal interneurons had no effect on the performance of well-learned CRs. Our findings highlight the role of hippocampal interneurons in the tEBC, and point to a potential cellular mechanism subserving associative learning.

| S-EPMC8353031 | biostudies-literature

Cerebellar Activation Deficits in Schizophrenia During an Eyeblink Conditioning Task.

Project description:The cognitive dysmetria theory of psychotic disorders posits that cerebellar circuit abnormalities give rise to difficulties coordinating motor and cognitive functions. However, brain activation during cerebellar-mediated tasks is understudied in schizophrenia. Accordingly, this study examined whether individuals with schizophrenia have diminished neural activation compared to controls in key regions of the delay eyeblink conditioning (dEBC) cerebellar circuit (eg, lobule VI) and cerebellar regions associated with cognition (eg, Crus I). Participants with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (n = 31) and healthy controls (n = 43) underwent dEBC during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Images were normalized using the Spatially Unbiased Infratentorial Template (SUIT) of the cerebellum and brainstem. Activation contrasts of interest were "early" and "late" stages of paired tone and air puff trials minus unpaired trials. Preliminary whole brain analyses were conducted, followed by cerebellar-specific SUIT and region of interest (ROI) analyses of lobule VI and Crus I. Correlation analyses were conducted between cerebellar activation, neuropsychological test scores, and psychotic symptom scores. In controls, the largest clusters of cerebellar activation peaked in lobule VI during early dEBC and Crus I during late dEBC. The schizophrenia group showed robust cortical activation to unpaired trials but no significant conditioning-related cerebellar activation. Crus I ROI activation during late dEBC was greater in the control than schizophrenia group. Greater Crus I activation correlated with higher working memory scores in the full sample and lower positive psychotic symptom severity in schizophrenia. Findings indicate functional cerebellar abnormalities in schizophrenia which relate to psychotic symptoms, lending direct support to the cognitive dysmetria framework.

| S-EPMC8443466 | biostudies-literature

Contingency awareness, aging, and the parietal lobe.

Project description:Contingency awareness is thought to rely on an intact medial temporal lobe and also appears to be a function of age, as older subjects tend to be less aware. The current investigation used functional magnetic resonance imaging, transcranial direct current stimulation, and eyeblink classical conditioning to study brain processes related to contingency awareness as a function of age. Older adults were significantly less aware of the relationship between the tone-airpuff pairings than younger adults. Greater right parietal functional magnetic resonance imaging activation was associated with higher levels of contingency awareness for younger and older subjects. Cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation over the right parietal lobe led to lower levels of awareness in younger subjects without disrupting conditioned responses. Older adults exhibited hyperactivations in the parietal and medial temporal lobes, despite showing no conditioning deficits. These findings strongly support the idea that the parietal cortex serves as a substrate for contingency awareness and that age-related disruption of this region is sufficient to impair awareness, which may be a manifestation of some form of naturally occurring age-related neglect.

| S-EPMC7953809 | biostudies-literature

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

OmicsDI is an Elixir interoperability service. Learn more ›

Tweets

OmicsDI Databases

PRIDE
PeptideAtlas
MassIVE
JPOST Repository
Physiome Model Repository

EGA
EVA
ENA
LINCS
PAXDB
Cell Collective

MetaboLights
Metabolomics Workbench
MetabolomeExpress
GNPS
BioModels
FAIRDOMHub

ArrayExpress
dbGaP
ExpressionAtlas
GEO
NODE

Information

Databases
Help
API
Contact us
Code on GitHub
Terms of use
Submit Data