An Attempt at Translating Novelty-enhanced Extinction of Context Conditioning From Rodents to Humans

Summary

In rodents, novel exploration has been used to strengthen the consolidation of a variety of hippocampal-dependent learning tasks. To our knowledge, no attempt have been made to translate the effect of strengthening the memory of an extinction of a context conditioning memory. This study uses virtual reality for both context conditioning and novel exploration in an attempt at translating these findings from rodents to humans, thus, using novel exploration to strengthen an extinction memory. Threat responses are measured with skin conductance and startle responses. If this effect could be shown experimentally in humans, that experimental setup could become an important tool in understanding important memory processes of fear, such as reconsolidation and behavioral tagging.

Conditions

• Healthy

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Novel Exploration

Exploration of a novel 3D-environment in virtual reality.

BEHAVIORAL

Threat conditioning

Session 1. Threat conditioning to two different (CS+, CS-) virtual reality contexts (i.e rooms). One of these is paired with a mild electric shock. The context paired with the electric shock (CS+) is counterbalanced across participants. Participants are instructed that they may receive electrical shocks during the procedure.

BEHAVIORAL

Extinction

Session 2. Participants are repeatedly exposed to the both contexts from session 1 (CS+, CS-), but no shocks are delivered.

BEHAVIORAL

Reinstatement

Session 3. Participants are again repeatedly exposed to both contexts from session 1 (CS+, CS-), after a few shocks delivered in a neutral context.

BEHAVIORAL

Visual attention control task

Session 2. A visual attention task used as a control task instead of novel exploration.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Uppsala University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Thomas Ågren, PhD · Uppsala University

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

50 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2021-11-15

Primary Completion

2022-05-01

Completion

2022-05-01

Countries

• Sweden

Study Locations