Auditory stimuli suppress contextual fear responses in safety learning independent of a possible safety meaning.

ABSTRACT: Safety learning allows the identification of non-threatening situations, a learning process instrumental for survival and psychic health. In contrast to fear learning, in which a sensory cue (conditioned stimulus, CS) is temporally linked to a mildly aversive stimulus (US), safety learning is studied by presenting the CS and US in an explicitly unpaired fashion. This leads to conditioned inhibition of fear responses, in which sensory cues can acquire a safety meaning (CS-). In one variant of safety learning, an auditory CS- was shown to reduce contextual fear responses during recall, as measured by freezing of mice. Here, we performed control experiments to test whether auditory stimuli might interfere with freezing by mechanisms other than safety learning, a phenomenon also called externa

SUBMITTER: Mombelli E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11499156 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature