Multiple fear-related stimuli enhance physiological arousal during extinction and reduce physiological arousal to novel stimuli and the threat conditioned stimulus

Highlights•Involved Pavlovian conditioning, extinction, extinction generalization test, and extinction retest.•Compared extinction with CS+ and CS− and generalization stimuli and ‘extinction-as-usual’.•Multiple stimuli increased physiological arousal to both CSs during, and negative CS evaluations, after extinction.•Multiple stimuli reduced physiological arousal to novel stimuli and CS+ after extinction but did not alter negative CS evaluations.•No group differences were observed in subjective anxiety ratings

rTMS of the occipital cortex abolishes Braille reading and repetition priming in blind subjects

To study the functional involvement of the visual cortex in Braille reading, we applied repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over midoccipital (MOC) and primary somatosensory (SI) cortex in blind subjects. After rTMS of MOC, but not SI, subjects made significantly more errors and showed an abolishment of the improvement in reading speed following repetitive presentation of the same word list, suggesting a role of the visual cortex in repetition priming in the blind

Resting Heart Rate Variability Predicts Safety Learning and Fear Extinction in an Interoceptive Fear Conditioning Paradigm

This study aimed to investigate whether interindividual differences in autonomic inhibitory control predict safety learning and fear extinction in an interoceptive fear conditioning paradigm. Data from a previously reported study (N = 40) were extended (N = 17) and re-analyzed to test whether healthy participants' resting heart rate variability (HRV) - a proxy of cardiac vagal tone - predicts learning performance. The conditioned stimulus (CS) was a slight sensation of breathlessness induced by a flow resistor, the unconditioned stimulus (US) was an aversive short-lasting suffocation experience induced by a complete occlusion of the breathing circuitry. During acquisition, the paired group received 6 paired CS-US presentations; the control group received 6 explicitly unpaired CS-US presentations. In the extinction phase, both groups were exposed to 6 CS-only presentations. Measures included startle blink EMG, skin conductance responses (SCR) and US-expectancy ratings. Resting HRV significantly predicted the startle blink EMG learning curves both during acquisition and extinction. In the unpaired group, higher levels of HRV at rest predicted safety learning to the CS during acquisition. In the paired group, higher levels of HRV were associated with better extinction. Our findings suggest that the strength or integrity of prefrontal inhibitory mechanisms involved in safety- and extinction learning can be indexed by HRV at rest

Feasibility of wearable-based collective sensing to detect environmental barriers for facilitating the elderly's mobility

In our aging society, the elderly's mobility has become critical for our collective prosperity. However, the elderly's mobility is limited in the current built environment due to various types of environmental barriers. Manual surveys have been conducted to detect such environmental barriers, but they are discontinuous, invasive to the elderly's daily lives, and labour-intensive. As such, these methods are not ideal for wider adoption. To continuously, less-invasively, and less-laboriously detect the environmental barriers and advance the elderly's mobility, this study proposes a wearable-based collective sensing approach. This approach measures collective stress, the stress commonly sensed from multiple people on a location, as an indicator of environmental barriers based on people's physiological and location data collected by wearable sensors. To test the feasibility of the proposed approach, a "collective stress metric" is suggested. Then, the values of the collective stress metric on locations of the test site were calculated based on the physiological and location data collected from 10 elderly subjects' daily trips for 2 weeks. Then, every location on the test site was categorized into locations "with environmental barriers" and "without environmental barriers" through site survey. Based on the collected data and results of site survey, the collective stress was statistically compared between locations with environmental barriers and without barriers. The result showed that the collective stress was statistically higher on locations with environmental barriers than without barriers. The results demonstrated that the collective stress has indication of environmental barriers, therefore, the proposed approach is feasible to detect the elderly's environmental barriers.Y