Delay conditioning refers to a situation in which the US is administered to co-terminate with or occur immediately after the CS. Two types of conditioning that are typically employed are delay or trace conditioning. Obviously, if in a conditioning context one administers a foot shock that is paired with a tone, there will be learning not only to the tone, but also to the context. In the case of rats and mice, this US is generally a foot shock. The dependent measure used in contextual and cued (delay or trace) fear conditioning is a freezing response that takes place following pairing of an unconditioned stimulus (US), such as foot shock or air puff, with a conditioned stimulus (CS), a particular context and/or such a cue. In general any of the procedures described in this chapter can be used for either the rat or the mouse. There are also several reports in higher species that are not covered in this chapter. The majority of the experiments reported in the literature involve the mouse however, there is also a generous proportion of the literature devoted to the rat.
Fear conditioning has gained popularity, in large part as a result of the need to characterize mutant mice and the effects of genetic alterations therefore, this chapter primarily focuses on fear conditioning.įear conditioning to either a cue or a context represents a form of associative learning that has been well used in many species. One main difference is that eye-blink conditioning takes many more training trials to establish. While the eye-blink procedure has overlap with context/cue fear conditioning and in many cases yields similar results, there are some basic differences between fear conditioning and eye-blink conditioning. Another form of associative learning that has gained popularity with behavioral pharmacologists is fear conditioning. Similar procedures have been used in cats, rats, and humans. The most common species used, the rabbit, has yielded interesting results, especially in identifying and elucidating the involvement of the cerebral cortex. One form of associative learning that has been used in multiple species, including humans, is eye-blink conditioning. Simplistically, associative learning is an adaptive process that allows an organism to learn to anticipate events. One way of elucidating mechanisms involved in discrete learning sessions is to study associative learning processes. The behavior of an animal has to be quantified using either visual or mechanical measures of a particular response. Understanding what an animal learns when exposed to novelty is of great interest to behavioral neuroscientists, but it can be challenging to understand what information is acquired in a particular learning session.