Laurent Grégoire¹, Leyla Ochoa¹, Shivam Pancholy¹, Liliana Hepburn¹, Steven Greening², Brian Anderson¹; ¹Texas A&M University, ²University of Manitoba (Canada)

Mental imagery plays a crucial role in emotions such as fear. Experimental research suggests that the content of visual experience is encoded similarly during perception and imagination. Whereas a visual percept is a mental representation elicited by an external stimulus, an imagined percept is a representation elicited internally that operates as a form of the corresponding visual percept and is associated with subjective vividness. Recent findings indicate that fear conditioning with imagined percepts generalizes to the corresponding visual percepts (as measured via skin conductance response and self-reported fear), despite the visual stimulus never being paired with the unconditioned stimulus. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether fear conditioning acquired via mental imagery could affect subsequent attention. Participants first completed a fear conditioning task in which an imagined CS+ (e.g., an imagined red square) was associated with shock and an imagined CS- (e.g., an imagined blue square) was neutral. Subsequently, they engaged in a visual search task. In Experiment 1, participants performed visual search for a shape-defined target. A singleton distractor was colored with a hue corresponding to either the imagined CS+ or CS-. No conditioning effect was observed at the group level, but the attentional effect toward the CS+ color was positively correlated with the ability to form vivid mental images as evaluated by the vividness of visual imagery questionnaire (VVIQ). In Experiment 2, we employed a more sensitive visual task and found that participants were unexpectedly biased toward the CS- color. This suggests that the CS- color was perceived as a safe signal, rather than a neutral stimulus as initially anticipated. Again, the attentional bias toward the CS+ color was positively correlated with VVIQ score, implying that attentional priority was linked to the ability to form vivid mental images during the conditioning phase.