Behavioral and neural correlates of diverse conditioned fear responses in male and female rats.

ABSTRACT: Pavlovian fear conditioning is a widely used tool that models associative learning in rodents. For decades the field has used predominantly male rodents and focused on a sole conditioned fear response: freezing. However, recent work from our lab and others has identified darting as a female-biased conditioned response, characterized by an escape-like movement across a fear conditioning chamber. It is also accompanied by a behavioral phenotype: Darters reliably show decreased freezing compared to Non-darters and males and reach higher velocities in response to the foot shock ("shock response"). However, the relationship between shock response and conditioned darting is not known. This study investigated if this link is due to differences in general processing of aversive stimuli between Dar

SUBMITTER: Mitchell JR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11370446 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature