Neurocognitive effects of phobia-related stimuli in animal-fearful individuals

Two experiments were conducted to explore neurocognitive effects of phobia-related stimuli. Contingency assessments and event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected from animal-fearful individuals during probabilistic classification learning in diverse motivational-affective contexts. As revealed by ERPs, attentional amplification of cortical sensory processing occurred in response to phobia-related stimuli. In particular, the posterior selection negativity in the ERPs to phobia-related stimuli had its origin in a bottom-up route, probably the amygdaloid-extrastriate cortex path. No evidence for top-down modulation of phobia-related attentional amplification was obtained. The covariation bias occurred only when aversive motivational-affective expectancies prevailed, suggesting a role of retrieval from associative emotional memory. Finally, phobia-related cue competition was probably related to the disruption of elaboration in memory of neutral and aversive stimulus pairings that was induced by belonging pairings of phobia-related and aversive stimuli. The findings have far-reaching implications for the interface between cognition and emotion.