title: The time course of location-avoidance learning in fear of spiders.
abstract: Two experiments were designed to study the time course of avoidance learning in spider fearfuls (SFs) under controlled experimental conditions. To achieve this, we employed an immersive virtual environment (IVE): While walking freely through a virtual art museum to search for specific paintings, the participants were exposed to virtual spiders. Unbeknown to the participants, only two of four museum rooms contained spiders, allowing for avoidance learning. Indeed, the more SF the participants were, the faster they learned to avoid the rooms that contained spiders (Experiment. 1), and within the first six trials, high fearfuls already developed a preference for starting their search task in rooms without spiders (Experiment 2). These results illustrate the time course of avoidance learning in SFs, and they speak to the usefulness of IVEs in fundamental anxiety research.
authors.affiliation: a Behavioural Science Institute , Radboud University Nijmegen , Nijmegen , the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Mike
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rinck
authors.affiliation: a Behavioural Science Institute , Radboud University Nijmegen , Nijmegen , the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Marieke
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Koene
authors.affiliation: a Behavioural Science Institute , Radboud University Nijmegen , Nijmegen , the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Sibel
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Telli
authors.affiliation: a Behavioural Science Institute , Radboud University Nijmegen , Nijmegen , the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Wiltine
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Moerman-van den Brink
authors.affiliation: a Behavioural Science Institute , Radboud University Nijmegen , Nijmegen , the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Verhoeven
authors.affiliation: a Behavioural Science Institute , Radboud University Nijmegen , Nijmegen , the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Eni S
authors.initials: ES
authors.lastname: Becker
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001362:Avoidance Learning; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013112:Spiders; D013997:Time Factors; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Avoidance learning; Fear of spiders; Spider phobia; Virtual reality