Salient Safety Conditioning Improves Novel Discrimination Learning.
Overgeneralized fear is a prevalent symptom in disorders of anxiety, and we are interested in finding therapeutic approaches to increase discrimination of non-threat in high-anxiety populations. We show that high anxiety mice (that also typically have high overgeneralized fear, like humans), improve in learning outcomes and discriminate non-threatening stimuli better after we train them on salient safety cues. It’s possible that our salient safety paradigm, trains the same networks as will later be active during non-threatening stimuli.
Great teamwork by Itzik and Jenny in the lab!