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Reactivation of hedonic but not sensory representations in human emotional learning

View ORCID ProfileM. R. Ehlers, View ORCID ProfileJ. H. Kryklywy, View ORCID ProfileA. O. Beukers, S. R. Moore, B. J. Forys, A.K. Anderson, View ORCID ProfileR. M. Todd
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.11.25.469891
M. R. Ehlers
1Department of Systems Neuroscience, University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany
2Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Canada
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  • For correspondence: ma.ehlers@uke.de
J. H. Kryklywy
2Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Canada
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A. O. Beukers
3Department of Psychology, Princeton University, United States
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S. R. Moore
4Department of Psychology, Cornell University, United States
5Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics, University of British Columbia, Canada
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B. J. Forys
2Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Canada
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A.K. Anderson
4Department of Psychology, Cornell University, United States
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R. M. Todd
2Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Canada
6Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, University of British Columbia, Canada
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Abstract

Learning which stimuli in our environment co-occur with painful or pleasurable events is critical for survival. Previous research has established the basic neural and behavioural mechanisms of aversive and appetitive conditioning; however, it is unclear what precisely is learned. Here we examined what aspects of the unconditioned stimulus (US) – sensory and hedonic – are transferred to the conditioned stimulus (CS). To decode the content of brain activation patterns elicited during appetitive (soft touch) and aversive (painful touch) conditioning of faces, a novel variation of representational similarity analysis (RSA) based on theoretically driven representational patterns of interest (POIs) was applied to fMRI data. Once face associations were learned through conditioning, globally the CS reactivated US representational patterns showing conditioning-dependent reactivation. More specifically, in higher order brain regions, the CS only reactivated hedonic but not sensory aspects of the US – suggesting that affective conditioning primarily carries forward the valence of the experience rather than its sensory origins.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted November 29, 2021.
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Reactivation of hedonic but not sensory representations in human emotional learning
M. R. Ehlers, J. H. Kryklywy, A. O. Beukers, S. R. Moore, B. J. Forys, A.K. Anderson, R. M. Todd
bioRxiv 2021.11.25.469891; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.11.25.469891
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Reactivation of hedonic but not sensory representations in human emotional learning
M. R. Ehlers, J. H. Kryklywy, A. O. Beukers, S. R. Moore, B. J. Forys, A.K. Anderson, R. M. Todd
bioRxiv 2021.11.25.469891; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.11.25.469891

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