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Fear Conditioning Assay in Mouse
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Fear Conditioning Assay in Mouse

Melissa Wang and Isabel Muzzio
Bio-protocol, Vol.3(7), e531
2013
DOI: 10.21769/BioProtoc.531
url
https://doaj.org/article/e657ef98cba44b058d3b239a3544835fView
Open Access

Abstract

The study of fear memory is important for understanding various anxiety disorders in which patients experience persistent recollections of traumatic events. These memories often involve associations of contextual cues with aversive events; consequently, Pavlovian classical conditioning is commonly used to study contextual fear learning. A form of contextual fear conditioning that is becoming increasingly important as an animal model of anxiety disorders uses predator odor as a fearful stimulus. Innate fear responses to predator odors are well characterized and reliable; however, attempts to use these odors as unconditioned stimuli in fear conditioning paradigms have been highly dependent on experimental setup and have produced inconsistent behavioral results. Here we present a contextual fear conditioning paradigm using coyote urine as the unconditioned stimulus, which has been shown to produce consistent contextual freezing in response to fear learning (Wang et al., 2012).

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