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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on March 20, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp052
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Not What You Expect: Experience but not Expectancy Predicts Conditioned Responses in Human Visual and Supplementary Cortex

Stephan Moratti1,2 and Andreas Keil3,4

1 Centro de Tecnología Biomédica (CTB) of the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Madrid 28040, Spain, 2 Centro de Magnetoencefalografía of the Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid 28040, Spain, 3 University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA, 4 Center of the Study of Emotion and Attention, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA

Address correspondence to Dr Stephan Moratti, CTB & Centro de Magnetoencefalografía Dr Perez Modrego, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Faculdad de Medicina, Pabellón 8, Avda. Complutense s/n, 28040 Madrid, Spain. Email: moratti{at}med.ucm.es.

When paired with aversive events, visual conditioned stimuli (CS) provoke increased activations in visual cortex. It is unclear however whether these changes reflect cognitive processes such as expectancy of the aversive unconditioned stimulus (US), or implicit associative learning of the contingencies outside awareness. Here, we used the "gambler's fallacy" phenomenon to parametrically and inversely manipulate the expectancy of an US and the number of conditioning trials: Increasing the number of CS–US pairings was associated with participants expecting the US to be less likely and vice versa. Magnetocortical activity evoked by the CS in occipital and supplementary motor areas was linearly related to the associative strength (number of CS–US pairings), but decreased as a function of expectancy. These results suggest that the cortical facilitation of fear cue processing is determined by associative strength and previous exposure to learning contingencies rather than by the cognitive anticipation for the US.

Key Words: expectancy • fear conditioning • magnetoencephalography • steady-state visual evoked fields • threat


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