‘Episodic Conditioning’: a novel approach to study the intersection of Pavlovian threat conditioning and episodic memory.

The powerful ways future behavior and cognition can be affected by emotional events are typically studied either by means of Pavlovian conditioning or episodic memory paradigms. However, due to their incompatible methods, little is known about how Pavlovian conditioning and episodic memory relate to each other, or work in concert to affect behavior and other cognitive processes. Here, we present a novel stimulus set consisting of 60 negative, neutral, and positive image/sound combinations (Affective Multi-modal Stimuli; AMS) that elicited strong subjective and psychophysiological emotional responses, the latter of which transferred to arbitrary predictors already after a single paired presentation in a new paradigm (Episodic Conditioning). Real-life emotional events are likely to involve both Pavlovian conditioning and episodic memory processes. The episodic conditioning paradigm enables their simultaneous assessment, thereby providing an opportunity to gain more holistic insight into how these process interact in sickness and in health.