Despite a wealth of knowledge on how humans and nonhuman animals learn to associate meaningful events with cues in the environment, far less is known about how humans learn to associate these events with the environment itself. Progress on understanding spatiotemporal contextual processes in humans has been slow in large measure by the methodological constraint of generating and manipulating immersive spatial environments in well-controlled laboratory settings. Fortunately, immersive Virtual Reality (iVR) technology has improved appreciably and affords a relatively straightforward methodology to investigate the role of context on learning, memory, and emotion while maintaining experimental control. Here, we review context conditioning literature in humans and describe challenges to study contextual learning in humans. We then provide details for a novel context threat (fear) conditioning paradigm in humans using a commercially available VR headset and a cross-platform game engine. This paradigm resulted in the acquisition of subjective threat, threat-conditioned defensive responses, and explicit threat memory. We make the paradigm publicly available and describe obstacles and solutions to optimize future studies of context conditioning using iVR. As computer technology advances to replicate the sensation of realistic environments, there are increasing opportunities to bridge the translational gap between rodent and human research on how context modulates cognition, which may ultimately lead to more optimal treatment strategies for anxiety- and stress-related disorders.

In times of uncertainty, people often seek out information to help alleviate fear, possibly leaving them vulnerable to false information. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we attended to a viral spread of incorrect and misleading information that compromised collective actions and public health measures to contain the spread of the disease. We investigated the influence of fear of COVID-19 on social and cognitive factors including believing in fake news, bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, and problem-solving—within two of the populations that have been severely hit by COVID-19: Italy and the United States of America. To gain a better understanding of the role of misinformation during the early height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we also investigated whether problem-solving ability and socio-cognitive polarization were associated with believing in fake news. Results showed that fear of COVID-19 is related to seeking out information about the virus and avoiding infection in the Italian and American samples, as well as a willingness to share real news (COVID and non-COVID-related) headlines in the American sample. However, fear positively correlated with bullshit receptivity, suggesting that the pandemic might have contributed to creating a situation where people were pushed toward pseudo-profound existential beliefs. Furthermore, problem-solving ability was associated with correctly discerning real or fake news, whereas socio-cognitive polarization was the strongest predictor of believing in fake news in both samples. From these results, we concluded that a construct reflecting cognitive rigidity, neglecting alternative information, and black-and-white thinking negatively predicts the ability to discern fake from real news. Such a construct extends also to reasoning processes based on thinking outside the box and considering alternative information such as problem-solving.

For episodic memories, reinstating the mental context of a past experience improves retrieval of memories formed during that experience. Does context reinstatement serve a similar role for implicit, associative memories such as fear and extinction? Here, we used a fear extinction paradigm to investigate whether the retrieval of extinction (safety) memories is associated with reactivation of the mental context from extinction memory formation. In a two-day Pavlovian conditioning, extinction, and renewal protocol, we collected functional MRI data while healthy adults and adults with PTSD symptoms learned that conditioned stimuli (CSs) signaled threat through association with an electrical shock. Following acquisition, conceptually related exemplars from the CS category no longer signaled threat (i.e., extinction). Critically, during extinction only, task-irrelevant stimuli were presented between each CS trial to serve as "context tags" for subsequent identification of the possible reinstatement of this extinction context during a test of fear renewal the next day. We found that healthy adults exhibited extinction context reinstatement, as measured via multivariate pattern analysis of fMRI data, in the medial temporal lobe that related to behavioral performance, such that greater reinstatement predicted CSs being rated as safe instead of threatening. Moreover, context reinstatement positively correlated with univariate activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, regions which are thought to be important for extinction learning. These relationships were not observed in the PTSD symptom group. These findings provide new evidence of a contextual reinstatement mechanism that helps resolve competition between the retrieval of opposing associative memories of threat and safety in the healthy adult brain that is dysregulated in PTSD.

Human emotions ebb and flow across time. However, it is unclear how these fluctuations in emotion influence the organization of episodic memory. Here, we examine how emotion dynamics transform experiences into memorable events. Custom musical pieces and a dynamic emotion-tracking tool were developed to elicit and measure temporal fluctuations in emotions. We demonstrate novel evidence that memory is organized around emotional states. While listening to music, fluctuations in emotional valence regulate an underlying tension between ongoing memory integration versus separation. Whereas a large absolute or negative shift in valence helps segment memories into episodes, a positive emotional shift binds sequential representations together. Both discrete and dynamic shifts in music-evoked valence and arousal also enhance delayed item and temporal source memory for concurrent neutral items, signaling the beginning of new emotional events. Emotions thereby have the power to sculpt episodic memories, informing new therapeutic methods for assessing and restoring memory organization.

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