This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and SBE's Cognitive Neuroscience program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dean Mobbs, PhD at California Institute of Technology, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the effects of anxiety on learning about ambiguous relationships between objects/situations, as well as the underlying neurocircuitry. Much of what people need to learn about in everyday life contains at least some degree of ambiguity. For example, meeting someone new is an ambiguous situation since it is unknown to what degree positive outcomes (e.g., enjoying the conversation, making a new friend or romantic partner) or negative outcomes (e.g., boredom, rejection) will occur. Ambiguity can potentially negatively affect people's learning and decision making in multiple situations, including financial, social, professional, or medical decision making. However, researchers know far less about how people learn to reduce ambiguity than how they learn about consistent relationships. Clinically, highly anxious individuals tend to have difficulty disambiguating whether objects/situations are dangerous or safe based on context, but it is less clear how anxiety affects our ability to learn how one discrete stimulus disambiguates the meaning of another discrete stimulus. For example, a person may feel anxious that giving a speech may lead to rejection only some of the time, such as when they give their speech after a particularly eloquent and engaging speaker. By understanding how people learn about ambiguity, the results of this project may ultimately contribute to research aiming to improve people's quality of life and the treatment of anxiety disorders.
Pavlovian occasion setting is a learning phenomenon in which specific stimuli (i.e., occasion setters) help resolve ambiguity. Occasion setting occurs when a stimulus (X) modulates the relationship between two other stimuli: usually a conditional stimulus (CS) and a biologically relevant stimulus (i.e., unconditional stimulus; US). For example, positive occasion setting occurs when the CS predicts the US only if the occasion setter, X, is presented. Occasion setters can be contextual cues (e.g., time, place) or discrete cues (e.g., tone, light). For example, whether giving public speeches leads to rejection from the audience may be ambiguous/uncertain. For a person who is sometimes afraid of this happening, giving a speech after a particularly eloquent speaker (discrete cue occasion setter) or in a particular location where the audience is known to be critical (contextual occasion setter) may disambiguate the situation, leading to increased fear of rejection. In this research proposal, the goal is to better understand occasion setting, its neural mechanism, and its relation to anxiety. This project consists of two Pavlovian fear conditioning studies: the first study will assess the effects of anxiety on disambiguating safety/danger with discrete stimulus occasion setting, and the second will be conducted using fMRI to investigate the neural mechanisms of discrete stimulus occasion setting. The researchers will also measure self-report and physiological responses of fear in both studies. By understanding occasion setting, this project may be able to contribute to research aimed at improving people's quality of life and improve the treatment of anxiety disorders.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
