Decreased cued fear discrimination learning in female rats as a function of estrous phase
- Corresponding author: fjh{at}uwm.edu
Abstract
Relative to males, female rats can show enhanced contextual fear generalization (demonstrating a fear response in a safe or neutral context) dependent on estrogen receptor activation. The current experiment aimed to extend this finding to cued fear conditioning. Females in low-estrogen phases of the estrous cycle showed good discrimination, similar to males, between a conditional stimulus that predicted shock (CS+) and an equally familiar one that did not (CS−), while females in the proestrus (high estrogen) phase demonstrated similar levels of fear between the CS+ and CS−. These results demonstrate that cued fear generalization is similarly influenced by endogenous estrogens.
Footnotes
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Article is online at http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/lm.051185.119.
- Received November 14, 2019.
- Accepted March 6, 2020.
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