Safety learning during adolescence facilitates fear regulation in adult mice.

ABSTRACT: Experiences during sensitive early life developmental periods such as adolescence have a profound influence on brain maturation and long-term affective behavior. While substantial work focuses on early life adversity, emerging evidence suggests that positive affective experiences can also shape trajectories of neurobehavioral development. This study examined how experience with fear conditioning or discriminative conditioning (i.e., safety learning) during either adolescence or adulthood in male and female mice influenced fear behavior and engagement with an anxiogenic environment one month later, when adolescents had aged to adulthood. Prior conditioning (both fear and safety training) at either age, regardless of valence, promoted later fear generalization to a novel cue. In contrast, sa

SUBMITTER: Meyer HC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12569829 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature