Modulation of auditory neural responses by a visual context in human fear conditioning

Responses to a stimulus signaling danger depend not only on the nature of that stimulus, but also on the context in which it is presented. A large body of work has been conducted in experimental animals investigating the neural correlates of contextual modulation of fear responses. However, much less is known about this process in humans. In this study we used functional MRI in a fear conditioning paradigm to explore this phenomenon. Responses to acoustic conditioned stimuli in auditory cortex were modulated by the presence of a visual context which signaled the likelihood of receiving an aversive unconditioned stimulus. Furthermore, the presence of the aversive visual context was associated with enhanced activity in parietal cortex, which may reflect an increase in attention to the presence of environmental threat stimuli.