Enhancing Extinction via Novelty Exploration

Project Description: This study examines the question of whether novel exploration can enhance fear extinction learning. This study and our hypotheses are based on prior research on behavioral tagging demonstrating that weak learning can be enhanced when followed by a novel strong learning experience (i.e., open field exploration; for review, Moncada et al., 2015). In animals, this effect has been demonstrated for contextual fear conditioning (Ballarini et al., 2009) and extinction of contextual fear conditioning (Carvalho et al., 2012, 2014; Liu et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2016; Justel et al., 2016). This study attempts to translate these findings to humans.

This study examines this question by having healthy participants undergo threat acquisition on day 1 and extinction followed by a novel exploration task or a task that is not novel on day 2. In the animal research described above, an open field box was used for the novel exploration task. As animals are accustomed to residing in smaller boxes, this represents an interesting environment that they have never experienced before. To attempt to mimic this experience for humans, we chose a virtual reality (VR) task that allows participants to explore a surreal planet and we are only enrolling individuals who have never used VR. On day 3, the return of defensive responses is assessed with a test of spontaneous recovery and reinstatement. We hypothesize that the novel exploration task will enhance extinction learning as assessed using skin conductance and pupillometry data.