Behavioral mechanisms of context fear generalization in mice.

ABSTRACT: There is growing interest in generalization of learned contextual fear, driven in part by the hypothesis that mood and anxiety disorders stem from impaired hippocampal mechanisms of fear generalization and discrimination. However, there has been relatively little investigation of the behavioral and procedural mechanisms that might control generalization of contextual fear. We assessed the relative contribution of different contextual features to context fear generalization and characterized how two common conditioning protocols-foreground (uncued) and background (cued) contextual fear conditioning-affected context fear generalization. In one experiment, mice were fear conditioned in context A, and then tested for contextual fear both in A and in an alternate context created by changing a s

SUBMITTER: Huckleberry KA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5110986 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature