The extent to which neural representations of fear experience depend on or generalize across the situational context has remained unclear. We systematically manipulated variation within and across three distinct fear-evocative situations including fear of heights, spiders, and social threats. Participants (n = 21; 10 females and 11 males) viewed ~20 s clips depicting spiders, heights, or social encounters and rated fear after each video. Searchlight multivoxel pattern analysis was used to identify whether and which brain regions carry information that predicts fear experience and the degree to which the fear-predictive neural codes in these areas depend on or generalize across the situations. The overwhelming majority of brain regions carrying information about fear did so in a situation-dependent manner. These findings suggest that local neural representations of fear experience are unlikely to involve a singular pattern but rather a collection of multiple heterogeneous brain states.

恐惧体验的神经表征在多大程度上依赖于或泛化整个情境背景尚不清楚。我们系统地操纵了三种不同的恐惧唤起情境内部和之间的变化，包括恐高症、蜘蛛和社会威胁。参与者 （n = 21;10 名女性和 11 名男性） 观看了 ~20 秒的描绘蜘蛛、身高或社交接触的剪辑，并在每个视频后对恐惧进行了评分。探照灯多体素模式分析用于确定是否以及哪些大脑区域携带预测恐惧体验的信息，以及这些区域中的恐惧预测神经代码在多大程度上依赖于或泛化于各种情况。绝大多数携带恐惧信息的大脑区域都是以情境依赖的方式进行的。这些发现表明，恐惧体验的局部神经表征不太可能涉及单一模式，而是多种异质大脑状态的集合。