Recent data reveal that the thalamic nucleus reuniens (RE) has a critical role in the extinction of conditioned fear. Muscimol (MUS) infusions into the RE impair within-session extinction of conditioned freezing and result in poor long-term extinction memories in rats. Although this suggests that RE inactivation impairs extinction learning, it is…

The ability to generate memories that persist throughout a lifetime (that is, memory persistence) emerges in early development across species. Although it has been shown that persistent fear memories emerge between late infancy and adolescence in mice, it is unclear exactly when this transition takes place, and whether two major fear conditioning…

The role of awareness in differential delay eyeblink conditioning (EBC) has been a topic of much debate. We tested the idea that awareness is required for differential delay EBC when two cues are perceptually similar. The present study manipulated frequencies of auditory conditioned stimuli (CS) to vary CS similarity in three groups of…

Visual imagery and mental reconstruction of scenes are considered core components of episodic memory retrieval. Individuals with absent visual imagery (aphantasia) score lower on tests of autobiographical memory, suggesting that aphantasia may be associated with differences in episodic and associative processing. In this online study, we tested…

Discrimination between sensory stimuli associated with safety and threat is crucial for behavioral decisions. Discriminative conditioning paradigms with two acoustic conditioned stimuli (one paired with shock [CS+], the other unpaired with shock [CS-]) have been widely used as an experimental model for fear learning. However, no attention has been…

Inclusion of male and female subjects in behavioral neuroscience research requires a concerted effort to characterize sex differences in standardized behavioral assays. Sex differences in hippocampus-dependent assays have been widely reported but are still poorly characterized. In the present study, we conducted a parametric analysis of…

Dysfunctions in memory recall lead to pathological fear; a hallmark of trauma-related disorders, like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Both, heightened recall of an association between a cue and trauma, as well as impoverished recall that a previously trauma-related cue is no longer a threat, result in a debilitating fear toward the cue.…

While results from many past studies have implicated the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) in mediating the expression of sustained negative affect, recent studies have highlighted a more complex role for BNST that includes aspects of fear learning in addition to defensive responding. As BNST is thought to encode ambiguous or…

Multiple lines of evidence suggest that glucocorticoid hormones enhance memory consolidation of fearful events. However, most of these studies involve male individuals. Since anxiety, fear, and fear-associated disorders present differently in male and female subjects we investigated in mice whether male and female mice perform differently in a…

Presentation of a previously trained Pavlovian conditioned stimulus while an organism is engaged in operant responding can moderate the rate of responding, a phenomenon known as Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer. Although it is well known that Pavlovian contingencies will generate conditioned behavior that is temporally organized with respect to…

Learning to recognize a stimulus category requires experience with its many natural variations. However, the mechanisms that allow a category's sensorineural representation to be updated after experiencing new exemplars are not well understood, particularly at the molecular level. Here we investigate how a natural vocal category induces expression…

Four experiments used a sensory preconditioning protocol to examine how a dangerous context influences learning about innocuous events. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3, rats were exposed to presentations of a tone followed immediately or 20-sec later by presentations of a light. These tone-light pairings occurred in a context that was either familiar…

Generalization of fear can involve abnormal responding to cues that signal safety and is common in people diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Differential auditory fear conditioning can be used as a tool to measure changes in fear discrimination and generalization. Most prior work in this area has focused on elevated amygdala activity…

The retrosplenial cortex (RSC) has a well-established role in contextual and spatial learning and memory, consistent with its known connectivity with visuo-spatial association areas. In contrast, RSC appears to have little involvement with delay fear conditioning to an auditory cue. However, all previous studies have examined the contribution of…

The sensory properties of a reward-paired cue (a conditioned stimulus; CS) may impact the motivational value attributed to the cue, and in turn influence the form of the conditioned response (CR) that develops. A cue with multiple sensory qualities, such as a moving lever-CS, may activate numerous neural pathways that process auditory and visual…