The role of Threat-Induced Freezing in Perceptual Decision-Making
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2021-08-17
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en
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In threatening situations, organisms need to make rapid and accurate perceptual decisions to improve survival chances. These decisions are likely improved by physiological responses to threat such as freezing, a state that is characterized by reduced immobility and is often accompanied by parasympathetically-driven heart rate decelerations. Freezing may induce changes in sensitivity, the separation between signal and noise distributions, and criterion, the overall willingness to say that a target is present. To assess how freezing may facilitate perceptual decisions, we analysed behavioural, heart rate, and skin conductance responses of 47 participants (of the 52 to be tested) who completed a perceptual decision-making paradigm under threat of shock with a priming manipulation of prior experience. Participants judged the presence of a backwards-masked oriented grating (presence rate 50%) while they were primed with rare (presence rate 20%) or frequent (presence rate 80%) priming blocks whilst under threat-of-shock on half of the trials. Results indicated that under threat, hit rate and perceptual sensitivity (d’) were enhanced compared to the safe condition. Although the priming manipulation successfully decreased the criterion in the frequent condition compared to the rare condition, there was no effect of threat on the strength of this shift. Finally, we found an increased heart rate deceleration for hit trials compared to miss trials for both threat and safe, likely reflecting effects of attention and action preparation. These findings suggest that when action preparation is necessary for survival, freezing facilitates perceptual decisions by enhancing perceptual sensitivity during early stages of visual processing.
Keywords: freezing, perception, decision-making, sensitivity, criterion, bias, threat
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen