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- Title
Neuronal activity in sensory cortex predicts the specificity of learning in mice.
- Authors
Wood, Katherine C.; Angeloni, Christopher F.; Oxman, Karmi; Clopath, Claudia; Geffen, Maria N.
- Abstract
Learning to avoid dangerous signals while preserving normal responses to safe stimuli is essential for everyday behavior and survival. Following identical experiences, subjects exhibit fear specificity ranging from high (specializing fear to only the dangerous stimulus) to low (generalizing fear to safe stimuli), yet the neuronal basis of fear specificity remains unknown. Here, we identified the neuronal code that underlies inter-subject variability in fear specificity using longitudinal imaging of neuronal activity before and after differential fear conditioning in the auditory cortex of mice. Neuronal activity prior to, but not after learning predicted the level of specificity following fear conditioning across subjects. Stimulus representation in auditory cortex was reorganized following conditioning. However, the reorganized neuronal activity did not relate to the specificity of learning. These results present a novel neuronal code that determines individual patterns in learning. The neural mechanisms underpinning the specificity of fear memories remains poorly understood. Here, the authors highlight how neural activity prior to fear learning impacts fear memory specificity.
- Subjects
AUDITORY cortex; AUDITORY perception; PRIOR learning
- Publication
Nature Communications, 2022, Vol 13, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
2041-1723
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/s41467-022-28784-w