# Valenced tactile information is evoked by neutral visual cues following emotional learning

## TL;DR

This study shows that emotional learning can make neutral visual cues evoke pleasant or unpleasant tactile sensations based on past experiences.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a novel modeling approach using RSA to decode what information is transferred during emotional conditioning.

## Key findings

- Conditioning leads to reactivation of unconditioned stimulus patterns in high-order brain regions.
- The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex reactivates affective salience patterns linked to the US after conditioning.
- Neutral visual cues can evoke valenced tactile information following emotional learning.

## Abstract

Learning which stimuli in our environment co-occur with painful or pleasurable events is critical for survival. Previous research has established the basic neural and behavioral mechanisms of aversive and appetitive conditioning; however, it is unclear precisely what information content is learned. Here we examined the degree to which aspects of the unconditioned stimulus (US)—sensory information versus affective salience—are transferred to the conditioned stimulus (CS). To decode what stimuli features (e.g., valence vs. discriminative somatosensation) are represented in patterns of brain activation elicited during appetitive (soft touch) and aversive (painful touch) conditioning to faces, a novel approach to using modeling with representational similarity analysis (RSA) based on theoretically driven representational patterns of interest (POIs) was applied to fMRI data. Once associations were learned through conditioning, globally, the CS reactivated US representational patterns showing conditioning-dependent reactivation in specific high-order brain regions: In the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, the CS reactivated patterns associated with the affective salience of the US—suggesting that, with affective conditioning, these regions carry forward the affective associations of the experience.