Reactivity to conditioned threat cues is distinct from exploratory drive in the elevated plus maze.

ABSTRACT: Fear and anxiety are adaptive states that allow humans and animals alike to respond appropriately to threatening cues in their environment. Commonly used tasks for studying behaviour akin to fear and anxiety in rodent models are Pavlovian threat conditioning and the elevated plus maze (EPM), respectively. In threat conditioning the rodents learn to associate an aversive event with a specific stimulus or context. The learnt association between the two stimuli (the 'memory') can then be recalled by re-exposing the subject to the conditioned stimulus. The elevated plus maze is argued to measure the agoraphobic avoidance of the brightly lit open maze arms in crepuscular rodents. These two tasks have been used extensively, yet research into whether they interact is scarce. We investigated wheth

SUBMITTER: Hilton JR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10107846 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature