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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2018 Nov 15.
Published in final edited form as: Neuroimage. 2017 Sep 1;162:373–383. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.08.080

Figure 1. Experimental Paradigm.

Figure 1

The four events within each affective contextual learning trial. Red fixation crosses (500–820ms duration) indicate inter-stimulus intervals. (a) Affective video cues: sample still frames from videos (3000ms duration) of actors expressing fearful, happy and emotionally neutral facial expressions. (b) Decision-phase: following the fixation cross, through trial and error, participants learned to choose which of two pictures (top or bottom) was most emotionally congruent with the previously observed expression in (a). (c) a feedback condition reminding participants of their choice (circled in red); (d) monetary outcome phase: an outcome window showing participants the monetary outcome resulting from their choices. The outcome was programed to an 80% probability (i.e., 20% of the trials were invalid), in accordance with the emotion congruency matching rules. (b1 & b2) example feedback for an easy/low decision-load trial (b1) and for a difficult/high decision-load trial (b2).