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Small Animal Behavior Core Laboratory
Services
Fear
Conditioning
Description:
Fear conditioning testing is performed by placing a
rodent in a box equipped with a mechanism for tracking the movement of the
animal (e.g., by recording photobeam breaks). Context Dependent Freezing
is a type of fear conditioning used to evaluate the learned aversion of an
animal for an environment that has been associated with a mild aversive
stimulus. The dependent variable (measured behavioral response) is freezing
behavior. Cue Dependent Freezing is a type of test in which an
animal is placed in a box and a tone (usually 80 dB) is delivered for a set
length of time, followed by a brief mild aversive stimulus. Later the
animal is placed in a novel environment (i.e., one with different lighting,
olfactory cues, and visual cues). As the animal moves around in the new
environment, the tone is presented and any freezing behavior associated with
the tone is measured.
Purpose:
The fear conditioning test
is used to measure hippocampally dependent associative learning.
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