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Published February 2006 | Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Contingency awareness in human aversive conditioning involves the middle frontal gyrus

Abstract

In contrast to the wealth of data describing the neural mechanisms underlying classical conditioning, we know remarkably little about the mechanisms involved in acquisition of explicit contingency awareness. Subjects variably acquire contingency awareness in classical conditioning paradigms, in which they are able to describe the temporal relationship between a conditioned cue and its outcome. Previous studies have implicated the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in the acquisition of explicit knowledge, although their specific roles remain unclear. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to track the trial-by-trial acquisition of explicit knowledge in a concurrent trace and delay conditioning paradigm. We show that activity in bilateral middle frontal gyrus and parahippocampal gyrus correlates with the accuracy of explicit contingency awareness on each trial. In contrast, amygdala activation correlates with conditioned responses indexed by skin conductance responses (SCRs). These results demonstrate that brain regions known to be involved in other aspects of learning and memory also play a specific role, reflecting on each trial the acquisition and representation of contingency awareness.

Additional Information

c2005 Elsevier Inc. Received 26 April 2005; revised 19 July 2005; accepted 1 September 2005. Available online 24 October 2005. This work was supported by grants from the Gordon Moore Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Sandia National Laboratory, and the Wellcome Trust Programme Grant to RJD. RMC would like to thank N. Tsuchiya, C. Hofstötter, and K. Watson for discussions and comments on the manuscript.

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