F&S Presentation Flashcards
Methods - Materials - (5)
“Let’s dive deeper into the specifics of the experiment.
The materials consisted of 80 unique images split evenly between tools and animals, excluding highly threatening images of animals and tools like knives and snakes.
An aversive Unconditioned Stimulus (US) was administered to the participants in the form of a 6-millisecond electrical shock to the right wrist, calibrated individually for each participant to ensure it was rated as ‘annoying but not painful.’
To gauge participants’ expectancy of receiving the shock, the study used a rating bar ranging from 0 (”sure the US won’t occur on this trial”) to 5 (” uncertainty whether the US will occur on this trial”) to 10 (”sure the US will occur on this trial”)
A rating bar also used in recognition memory test to collect memory confidence ratings after 24 hours
Method - Procedure - (5)
Moving on to the procedure, on Day 1,
The fear conditioning procedure was performed across 4 training runs.
Each run included 20 conditioned stimuli (10 tools and 10 animals), with participants rating their expectancy of the aversive US shock using rating bar while stimuli were presented for 6 seconds.
After, a white fixation cross appeared for 10-12 seconds
For each participant, one object category (e.g., animals) served as CS+ where 50% of exemplars was reinforced with US while other object category (e.g., tools) served as CS- where none of its exemplars reinforced with US.
Method - Procedure Continued - (2)
Transitioning to Day 2, participants underwent a surprise recognition memory test, 24 hours later in which they saw seen and unseen images of tools and animals and rated their level of memory confidence (from definitely new to definitely old)
Throughout both days of experiment, Skin Conductance Responses (SCRs) was continuously recorded to track sympathetic arousal in response to the conditioned stimuli and aversive US.
