“Unfolding ‘fear’ beyond a snapshot: Acquisition and alleviation of temporally dynamic fear memories”
Dr. Ai Koizumi
Researcher, Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.
Date/Time
Monday, October 31 2022, 11:40-12:30
Abstract
Fear memory paradigms typically render human participants as passive agents who are asked to stationarily await the delivery of threatening cues in a blank period, allowing neither environmental inference nor bodily movements. Such passive fear memories deviate from how humans have evolved as active agents who would continuously sample environmental cues and make bodily movements accordingly, enhancing the prediction and prevention of threatening outcomes. In my talk, I will present two studies aiming to capture the active nature of human fear memory. In the first study, participants underwent naturalistic threatening events as a continuous experience composed of a series of environmental cues. We show that human participants regulate their anticipatory fear-like responses by incorporating the temporal order of the preceding environmental cues with unique prefrontal mechanisms. In the second study, participants experienced threatening events in virtual reality (VR) where their bodily movements were liberated. We show that acquiring fear memory leads to deviated spatio-temporal body movement patterns toward threat versus safety cues. Moreover, embodied defense training to prevent threats in VR alleviated the acquired fear memory, suggesting the role of bodily movements in both acquisition and alleviation of human fear memories. Capturing the active nature of human fear memory by enhancing temporal and bodily dynamics in experiments may facilitate the translation of neuroscientific findings to real-world clinical applications for fear-related disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorders.