Martina Garraffo

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Unveiling the neural underpinnings of Safety Learning in humans through EEG

Learning that something is safe is a fundamental process that allows us to navigate uncertain environments and regulate behaviour effectively. Safety signals help reduce uncertainty, guide adaptive decision-making, and support flexible updating when circumstances change.

Despite this, most research has focused on how the brain learns about threat, with comparatively little attention given to safety learning as an active and independent process. Understanding how safety is acquired, represented, and used - and how this varies across individuals - is therefore an important open question.

Previous work from our group has shown that individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can learn about threat, but show impairments in learning about safety signals in a standard differential conditioning paradigm (Apergis-Schoute et al., 2017). This demonstrates that safety learning relies on distinct mechanisms that can be selectively disrupted. Complementary findings from the lab show that individuals with OCD also have difficulties learning under uncertainty and exhibit reduced flexibility when updating established rules (Apergis-Schoute et al., 2024). Together, these findings suggest a broader alteration in how information is attended to and used to guide learning, particularly when it comes to incorporating new or uncertain evidence.

My PhD project will investigate the behavioural and neural mechanisms underlying safety learning in the general population, with a particular focus on how safety signals are influenced by perceptual uncertainty. Using a combination of behavioural paradigms and physiological measures - including EEG, skin conductance, eye tracking, and pupil dilation - this work aims to characterise the core processes supporting safety learning.

By establishing these mechanisms in the general population, this research will provide a foundation for translating safety learning research into clinical contexts, including OCD and related disorders, and has the potential to inform and refine therapeutic approaches such as exposure-based treatments.

Research