Differential impacts of advanced age and sex in age-related trace fear memory impairment in rats.

While cognitive function remains stable for majority of the lifespan, many functions sharply decline in later life. Women have higher rates of neurodegenerative diseases that involve memory loss, including Alzheimer's disease. This sex disparity may be due to longer life expectancies when compared to men; women outlive men by roughly 5 years globally.

Context controls the ability of unconditional stimulus deflation to mitigate fear relapse.

Our lab, and others, have recently demonstrated that fear behavior can be weakened following fear acquisition with a footshock unconditional stimulus by presenting a weaker version of that footshock, a phenomenon termed 'unconditional stimulus deflation' or US deflation. Unlike extinction, US deflation putatively functions by modifying the original fear memory, potentially making it a more effective candidate for reducing fear and preventing relapse effects often observed following extinction. Here, we adapted our contextual fear US deflation procedure to a delay conditioning paradigm in order to examine common relapse phenomena: renewal and reinstatement.

Stress-enhanced fear learning can be reduced with unconditional stimulus deflation with constraints.

Exposure to extreme stress can negatively impact behavior and lead to prolonged fear sensitization. These processes can be studied in the lab using stress-enhanced fear learning (SEFL), where prior exposure to inescapable stress exacerbates later contextual fear conditioning. A common method to reduce conditional fear is through extinction, where a conditional stimulus once paired with an unconditional (US; e.

Corrigendum: Generalization and discrimination of inhibitory avoidance differentially engage anterior and posterior retrosplenial subregions.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2024.

Fear extinction is impaired in aged rats.

Normal aging is accompanied by broad loss of cognitive function in humans and rodents, including declines in cognitive flexibility. In extinction, a conditional stimulus (CS) that was previously paired with a footshock is presented alone. This procedure reliably reduces conditional freezing behavior in young adult rats.

Generalization and discrimination of inhibitory avoidance differentially engage anterior and posterior retrosplenial subregions.

Introduction: In a variety of behavioral procedures animals will show selective fear responding in shock-associated contexts, but not in other contexts. However, several factors can lead to generalized fear behavior, where responding is no longer constrained to the conditioning context and will transfer to novel contexts.

Methods: Here, we assessed memory generalization using an inhibitory avoidance paradigm to determine if generalized avoidance behavior engages the retrosplenial cortex (RSC).

Fear Reduced Through Unconditional Stimulus Deflation Is Behaviorally Distinct From Extinction and Differentially Engages the Amygdala.

Background: Context fear memory can be reliably reduced by subsequent pairings of that context with a weaker shock. This procedure shares similarities with extinction learning: both involve extended time in the conditioning chamber following training and reduce context-elicited fear. Unlike extinction, this weak-shock exposure has been hypothesized to engage reconsolidation-like processes that weaken the original memory.