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Threat extinction through unrecognizable mid-level visual features

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Jamie Greer¹ (), Talia Konkle¹, Joseph E Dunsmoor², Annika Inampudi¹, Manar Abrre¹, Pascale Fung¹, Hiral Chavre¹, Elizabeth A Phelps¹; ¹Harvard University, ²University of Texas at Austin

Emotional memories can contribute to psychological disorders. A primary treatment, exposure therapy, is effective but can be unpleasant because it requires repeatedly confronting feared stimuli. We explored a less aversive alternative using “texforms,” stimuli derived from images of animals and objects that preserve mid-level visual features and elicit similar ventral stream activation patterns as the original images, but are unrecognizable. We tested whether such mid-level visual representations support extinction. Participants underwent threat acquisition where they viewed animals and objects, with exemplars from one category sometimes paired with shock (CS+) and the other not (CS-). Threat response was indexed via skin conductance response (SCR). They then viewed new animals and objects (conventional extinction; n = 32), texform versions of those images (texform extinction; n = 32), or a neutral video (no extinction; n = 32), all without shock. Consistent with extinction learning, CS+ exemplars evoked higher SCRs than CS- exemplars during early trials of conventional extinction, but this was not observed for texform extinction. Two minutes later, participants viewed new animals and objects (test phase). Both conventional and texform extinction were successful; during the test phase, only participants who did not undergo either extinction showed significantly higher SCRs to the CS+ than the CS-. When asked after the test phase, participants were unable to identify the specific objects or animals corresponding to the texform stimuli. These findings suggest that exposure to unrecognizable images preserving mid-level features may reduce conditioned threat responses without evoking physiological reactions, offering a less aversive extinction method.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions