The Neuropsychology of Fear Learning

In the current approach, fear conditioning experiments have been conducted with patients with various brain lesions. Moreover, multiple physiological measures are used trying to disentangle fear acquisition from contingency learning. In the first study, a case of intact fear conditioning to a visual cue is reported in a male patient with complete cortical blindness, suggesting that, at a simple level, fear acquisition does not require a cortical representation of the conditioned stimulus. In a second study, fear conditioning in 28 patients after left and right temporal lobectomy was compared to fear learning in 22 healthy controls. The data show a clear dissociation between conditioned startle potentiation and electrodermal response differentiation. While the latter was intact in half of the patients, startle potentiation could not be detected in patients with acute temporal lobectomy. Finally, data will be reported that suggest differences in learning depending upon whether the learning procedure was either a trace or a delay conditioning paradigm.