Does fear conditioning via mental imagery influence subsequent attention?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mental imagery consists in the formation of internal visual representations in the absence of external stimulation. Recent findings indicate that fear conditioning with imagined percepts generalises to the corresponding visual percepts, as measured by skin conductance response and self-reported fear, despite the visual stimulus never being paired with the unconditioned stimulus. The present study aimed to determine whether fear conditioning acquired via mental imagery could affect subsequent attention. Participants first completed a fear conditioning task in which an imagined CS+ (e.g. an imagined red square) was associated with shock and an imagined CS- (e.g. an imagined blue square) was neutral. Subsequently, they engaged in a visual search task for a shape-defined target. In Experiment 1, a singleton distractor was presented in a hue corresponding to either the imagined CS+ or CS-. No conditioning effect was observed at the group level. In Experiment 2, we employed a more sensitive visual search task and found an unexpected bias toward the imagined CS- colour, which might have been perceived as a safety signal. Crucially, in both experiments, the attentional bias toward the imagined CS+ colour was positively correlated with participants' ability to form vivid mental images. Overall, our data suggest that the influence of fear conditioning through mental imagery on subsequent attention depends on individuals' capacity for vivid mental imagery.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".