Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Fear conditioning is essential for understanding the etiology of anxiety disorders. In translational research, the ocular response (OR) stands out as a continuously measurable and non-invasive indicator of fear, generating a large volume of data without participant intervention. Although the OR varies in response to emotionally relevant stimuli, few studies use both visual conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (UCS) to assess learning by measuring the OR. This study aims to validate a model of fear conditioning by recording fixation time, number of fixations, first fixation latency, and expectation of EI occurrence during acquisition and extinction phases. The results demonstrate differential learning in the acquisition and extinction of the expectation of EI occurrence, as well as a greater number of fixations to aversive images.
Authors: Sebastián Cruz, Cecilia Cordero-Ruz, Jonathan Badilla, Marion Inostroza, Margarita Borquez, Vanetza Quezada-Scholz
Institutions: University of Chile, University of Tübingen
Language: English
Topic: Memory and Neural Mechanisms
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4413849719