Perceived imminence of threat and resulting intensity of defensive responses during serial compound stimulus conditioning are determined by auditory stimulus salience, not cue sequence as recently reported.

Parabrachial neurons expressing CGRP relay affective components of ascending pain information via distinct thalamic and amygdalar pathways, which together contribute to complementary aspects of adaptive threat responses.

Activity levels in anterior and posterior cholinergic basal forebrain neurons are associated with distinct aspects of global brain state, sensory salience, reward expectation, and aversive reinforcement learning.

Through associative learning, environmental context can come to exert control over the endogenous opioid system such that it is recruited as a conditioned compensatory response to ongoing painful stimuli in both male and female mice, or in anticipation of a painful stimulus in females.

The extracellular concentration of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens core is progressively diminished by white noise, an underutilized, easy-to-titrate aversive stimulus, but is unaffected by white-noise intensity, context valence, and associated probabilistic contingencies.

Neurons in the lateral habenula are activated by pain, bitterness and social defeat, and their responses are dynamically shaped by learning, suggesting a role in experience-dependent selection of behavioral actions to stressors.

Core associative learning phenomena that are observed in studies of eyeblink conditioning are also observed in sensorimotor adaptation, pointing to a common framework for these distinct cerebellar-dependent motor learning processes.

Real-time imaging of neural activity in behaving mice reveals that the two canonical types of neurons in the olfactory tubercle carry distinct information about learned odor cues, with D1 neurons representing stimulus valence and D2 neurons mainly representing stimulus identity.

Taste pathways to higher brain are critical for learned responses to taste compounds.

Structural and functional analysis of axonal-axonal reciprocal connections between dopamine neurons and Kenyon cells provides insight into the brain computations for normal associative olfactory learning.