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Volatile Sex Pheromone Extraction and Chemoattraction Assay in Caenorhabditis elegans
Published on: August 9, 2024
Social modulation of associative fear learning by pheromone communication
1Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, UCLA, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA. tbredy@mednet.ucla.edu
Abstract:
Mice communicate through visual, vocal, and olfactory cues that influence innate, nonassociative behavior. We here report that exposure to a recently fear-conditioned familiar mouse impairs acquisition of conditioned fear and facilitates fear extinction, effects mimicked by both an olfactory chemosignal emitted by a recently fear-conditioned familiar mouse and by the putative stress-related anxiogenic pheromone beta-phenylethylamine (beta-PEA). Together, these findings suggest social modulation of higher-order cognitive processing through pheromone communication and support the concurrent excitor hypothesis of extinction learning.
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