ArticleScientific reports2020
Visuocortical tuning to a threat-related feature persists after extinction and consolidation of conditioned fear.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Distinct Visual Pathways of Threat Retrieval in Fear-Conditioned Faces.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- A systematic review of spontaneous recovery in human fear conditioning.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- Psychometric Considerations in Assessing Fear Generalization as a Predictor of Anxiety.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2025Article
- Leveraging Psychophysics to Infer the Mechanisms of Encoding Change in Vision.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- Neurophysiological and Autonomic Dynamics of Threat Processing during Sustained Social Fear Generalization.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2025Article
- Generalized expectancy of threat in threatening compared to safe contexts.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Quantifying population-level neural tuning functions using Ricker wavelets and the Bayesian bootstrap.Journal of neuroscience methods · 2025Article
- The impact of inherently aversive contexts on visuocortical processing of generalized threat.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Neurophysiological and Autonomic Dynamics of Threat Processing During Sustained Social Fear Generalization.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Quantifying Population-level Neural Tuning Functions Using Ricker Wavelets and the Bayesian Bootstrap.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Motivated attention and task relevance in the processing of cross-modally associated faces: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Sensing fear: fast and precise threat evaluation in human sensory cortex.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2023Review
- Effects of phase synchronization and frequency specificity in the encoding of conditioned fear-a web-based fear conditioning study.PloS one · 2023Article
- Recommendations and publication guidelines for studies using frequency domain and time-frequency domain analyses of neural time series.Psychophysiology · 2022Article
- Associative learning shapes visual discrimination in a web-based classical conditioning task.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Fear conditioning prompts sparser representations of conditioned threat in primary visual cortex.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2020Article
- Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Neurons in the visual cortex sharpen their orientation tuning as humans learn aversive contingencies. A stimulus orientation (CS+) that reliably predicts an aversive noise (unconditioned stimulus: US) is selectively enhanced in lower-tier visual cortex, while similar unpaired orientations (CS-) are inhibited. Here, we examine in male volunteers how sharpened visual processing is affected by fear extinction learning (where no US is presented), and how fear and extinction memory undergo consolidation one day after the original learning episode. Using steady-state visually evoked potentials from electroencephalography in a fear generalization task, we found that extinction learning prompted rapid changes in orientation tuning: Both conditioned visuocortical and skin conductance responses to the CS+ were strongly reduced. Next-day re-testing (delayed recall) revealed a brief but precise return-of-tuning to the CS+ in visual cortex accompanied by a brief, more generalized return-of-fear in skin conductance. Explorative analyses also showed persistent tuning to the threat cue in higher visual areas, 24 h after successful extinction, outlasting peripheral responding. Together, experience-based changes in the sensitivity of visual neurons show response patterns consistent with memory consolidation and spontaneous recovery, the hallmarks of long-term neural plasticity.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.