Looming stimuli reliably drive innate defensive responses in male rats, but not learned defensive responses.

ABSTRACT: Survival relies on an organism's intrinsic ability to instinctively react to stimuli such as food, water, and threats, ensuring the fundamental ability to feed, drink, and avoid danger even in the absence of prior experience. These natural, unconditioned stimuli can also facilitate associative learning, where pairing them consistently with neutral cues will elicit responses to these cues. Threat conditioning, a well-explored form of associative learning, commonly employs painful electric shocks, mimicking injury, as unconditioned stimuli. It remains elusive whether actual injury or pain is necessary for effective learning, or whether the threat of harm is sufficient. Approaching predators create looming shadows and sounds, triggering strong innate defensive responses like escape and freezi

SUBMITTER: Heinemans M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11405667 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature