Reactivation of hedonic but not sensory representations in human emotional learning

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.