Mental representations of stimuli that are not physically present are critical for a range of cognitive capacities, including perception, memory, and learning. Overly robust mental representations, however, can contribute to hallucinations in healthy individuals and those diagnosed with psychotic illness. Measuring the strength of mental representations can thus provide insight into how the contents of the mind influence both adaptive and maladaptive behaviors. In rodents, the robustness of mental representations has been tested using the representation-mediated learning (RML) task, in which animals respond less to a cue after a stimulus that has previously been associated with this cue has been paired with illness. This suggests that the mental representation of the cue enters into a negative association during aversive learning, even though the cue is not physically present. Here, we developed a human version of the RML task in which participants initially learned associations between two visual symbols and two different appetitive food odors. Preference for the food odors was then tested immediately before and after a session in which one symbol was paired with an aversive noise. We observed that mediated learning, in the form of selective decrease in preference for the odor previously paired with the noise-predicting symbol, was directly proportional to direct aversive learning for the symbols themselves. These findings suggest that a mental representation of the odor entered into a negative association with the sound and pave the way for future studies aimed at characterizing the neural circuits of mediated learning in the human brain. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

---

心理表征调节人类的厌恶学习。

物理上不存在的刺激的心理表征对于一系列认知能力至关重要，包括感知、记忆和学习。然而，过于强烈的心理表征可能会导致健康人和被诊断患有精神病的人产生幻觉。因此，测量心理表征的强度可以深入了解心理内容如何影响适应性和适应不良行为。在啮齿类动物中，心理表征的稳健性已经通过表征介导学习（RML）任务进行了测试，在该任务中，在先前与该提示相关的刺激与疾病配对后，动物对提示的反应较小。这表明，尽管提示实际上并不存在，但在厌恶性学习过程中，提示的心理表征会进入负面关联。在这里，我们开发了 RML 任务的人类版本，参与者最初学习了两个视觉符号和两种不同的食欲食物气味之间的关联。然后在一个符号与令人厌恶的噪音配对的会话之前和之后测试对食物气味的偏好。我们观察到，中介学习以选择性减少对先前与噪音预测符号配对的气味的偏好的形式，与对符号本身的直接厌恶学习成正比。这些发现表明，气味的心理表征与声音形成负相关，并为未来旨在表征人脑介导学习的神经回路的研究铺平了道路。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。