A fear conditioned cue orchestrates a suite of behaviors in rats
- Boston College, United States
Abstract
Pavlovian fear conditioning has been extensively used to study the behavioral and neural basis of defensive systems. In a typical procedure, a cue is paired with foot shock, and subsequent cue presentation elicits freezing, a behavior theoretically linked to predator detection. Studies have since shown a fear conditioned cue can elicit locomotion, a behavior that - in addition to jumping, and rearing - is theoretically linked to imminent or occurring predation. A criticism of studies observing fear conditioned cue-elicited locomotion is that responding is non-associative. We gave rats Pavlovian fear discrimination over a baseline of reward seeking. TTL-triggered cameras captured 5 behavior frames/s around cue presentation. Experiment 1 examined the emergence of danger-specific behaviors over fear acquisition. Experiment 2 examined the expression of danger-specific behaviors in fear extinction. In total, we scored 112,000 frames for nine discrete behavior categories. Temporal ethograms show that during acquisition, a fear conditioned cue suppresses reward seeking and elicits freezing, but also elicits locomotion, jumping, and rearing - all of which are maximal when foot shock is imminent. During extinction, a fear conditioned cue most prominently suppresses reward seeking, and elicits locomotion that is timed to shock delivery. The independent expression of these behaviors in both experiments reveal a fear conditioned cue to orchestrate a temporally organized suite of behaviors.
Data availability
Raw images and observer judgments are freely available: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HKMUUN
Article and author information
Author details
Michael A McDannald
Funding
National Institutes of Health (MH117791)
- Michael A McDannald
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All protocols were approved by the Boston College Animal Care and Use Committee and all experiments were carried out in accordance with the NIH guidelines regarding the care and use of rats for experimental procedures. The Boston College experimental protocol supporting these procedures is 2024-001.
Copyright
© 2024, Chu et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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A fear conditioned cue orchestrates a suite of behaviors in rats
eLife 13:e82497.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.82497
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