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Modeling Context Similarity in Fear Renewal

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Shreya Rajagopal¹ (shreyara@umich.edu), Thad Polk¹; ¹University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Exposure therapy for anxiety and stress disorders relies on Pavlovian fear extinction, yet extinction is context-specific and generalizes only partially to new environments depending on their similarity to the extinction context. Understanding the computational basis of this generalization is critical for improving therapeutic outcomes, since patients rarely experience triggers in the exact therapy setting. Building on a neurally constrained model of fear extinction, we introduce the Context-Similarity Adjusted Fear Extinction and Renewal (C-SAFER) model. C-SAFER embeds contexts in a Euclidean representational space, consistent with hippocampal encoding of multidimensional concepts, where similarity decreases with distance via a Gaussian kernel. During extinction, hippocampal representations of each context form independent associations with a cue-specific extinction memory in the amygdala, countering the fear memory established during acquisition. At renewal, all prior extinction contexts partially activate the extinction engram, with their contributions weighted by similarity to the test context. Using only five free parameters, C-SAFER reproduces three hallmark findings: weaker renewal when extinction and test contexts are more similar, weaker renewal when extinction spans multiple contexts, and near elimination of renewal following extinction across multiple similar contexts. The model also generates two clinically relevant hypotheses: (1) the number of contexts required to suppress renewal increases exponentially with decreasing similarity with the test context, and (2) exposure therapy in a near-identical context is less effective than therapy distributed across two or more moderately similar contexts. C-SAFER provides a mechanistic account of context similarity in fear renewal and advances testable hypotheses for leveraging it to strengthen extinction.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions