NCT05150951

An Attempt at Translating Novelty-enhanced Extinction of Context Conditioning From Rodents to Humans

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 60 (actual)
• Sponsor: Uppsala University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 50 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

In rodents, novel exploration has been used to strengthen the consolidation of a variety of hippocampal-dependent learning tasks. To our knowledge, no attempt have been made to translate the effect of strengthening the memory of an extinction of a context conditioning memory. This study uses virtual reality for both context conditioning and novel exploration in an attempt at translating these findings from rodents to humans, thus, using novel exploration to strengthen an extinction memory. Threat responses are measured with skin conductance and startle responses. If this effect could be shown experimentally in humans, that experimental setup could become an important tool in understanding important memory processes of fear, such as reconsolidation and behavioral tagging.

Detailed description

The study employs healthy participants and includes three experimental sessions, roughly 24 h apart. During the first session, participants undergo context conditioning in virtual reality where the CS+ and CS- are two different rooms. During the second session, half of the participants perform an exploration of a novel virtual environment, and the other half performs a visual attention task. About 60 min later, participants undergo extinction to the context conditioning performed in session 1, again in virtual reality. In session 3, remaining threat responses are measured through a reinstatement procedure, again in virtual reality.

Conditions

• Healthy

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Novel Exploration	Exploration of a novel 3D-environment in virtual reality.
BEHAVIORAL	Threat conditioning	Session 1. Threat conditioning to two different (CS+, CS-) virtual reality contexts (i.e rooms). One of these is paired with a mild electric shock. The context paired with the electric shock (CS+) is counterbalanced across participants. Participants are instructed that they may receive electrical shocks during the procedure.
BEHAVIORAL	Extinction	Session 2. Participants are repeatedly exposed to the both contexts from session 1 (CS+, CS-), but no shocks are delivered.
BEHAVIORAL	Reinstatement	Session 3. Participants are again repeatedly exposed to both contexts from session 1 (CS+, CS-), after a few shocks delivered in a neutral context.
BEHAVIORAL	Visual attention control task	Session 2. A visual attention task used as a control task instead of novel exploration.

Timeline

• Start date: 2021-11-15
• Primary completion: 2022-05-01
• Completion: 2022-05-01
• First posted: 2021-12-09
• Last updated: 2022-06-10

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Sweden