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…