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Updated: Jul 18, 2026

Assessment of Cocaine-induced Behavioral Sensitization and Conditioned Place Preference in Mice
Published on: February 18, 2016
Cocaine and Pavlovian fear conditioning: dose-effect analysis
Suzanne C Wood1, Jonathan Fay, Jennifer R Sage
1Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive 0109, LaJolla, CA 92093-0109, United States. scwood@ucsd.edu
Abstract:
Emerging evidence suggests that cocaine and other drugs of abuse can interfere with many aspects of cognitive functioning. The authors examined the effects of 0.1-15mg/kg of cocaine on Pavlovian contextual and cued fear conditioning in mice. As expected, pre-training cocaine dose-dependently produced hyperactivity and disrupted freezing. Surprisingly, when the mice were tested off-drug later, the group pre-treated with a moderate dose of cocaine (15mg/kg) displayed significantly less contextual and cued memory, compared to saline control animals. Conversely, mice pre-treated with a very low dose of cocaine (0.1mg/kg) showed significantly enhanced fear memory for both context and tone, compared to controls. These results were not due to cocaine's anesthetic effects, as shock reactivity was unaffected by cocaine. The data suggest that despite cocaine's reputation as a performance-enhancing and anxiogenic drug, this effect is seen only at very low doses, whereas a moderate dose disrupts hippocampus and amygdala-dependent fear conditioning.
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