Uncertainty versus prediction error in Pavlovian fear conditioning: Commentary on Walker et al. (2019)

Defensive behavioral responses are contingent upon threat intensity, proximity, and context of exposure. Based on these factors, we developed a classical conditioning paradigm that elicits clear transitions between conditioned freezing and flight behavior within individual subjects. This model is crucial for the understanding the pathologies involved in anxiety, panic, and post-traumatic stress...

Fear Conditioning is a type of learning in which an association is established between a negative unpleasant event and a harmless stimulus. This leads to a fear of the harmless stimulus. This process is largely mediated by the amygdala, which is a brain region involved in emotions and stress reactions. Fear conditioning can be utilized in several ways to understand different aspects of learning and memory.
This video presents an overview of the principles behind fear conditioning, discusses the...

Here, we present a protocol to elicit Pavlovian conditioned approach behavior in rats. This procedure can be used to measure individual differences in the tendency to approach and attribute incentive salience to reward-related cues and investigate addiction vulnerability.

We describe an extended fear-conditioning protocol that produces overtraining and fear incubation in rats. This protocol entails a single training session with 25 tone-shock pairings (i.e., overtraining) and a comparison of conditioned freezing responses during context and cue tests 48 h (short-term) and 6 weeks (long-term) after...

In the following experiment we describe a protocol for trace fear conditioning in mice. This type of associative memory includes a trace period that separates the neutral stimulus and the unconditioned...

An experiment often consists of more than a single step. In this case, measurements at each step give rise to uncertainty. Because the measurements occur in successive steps, the uncertainty in one step necessarily contributes to that in the subsequent step. As we perform statistical analysis on these types of experiments, we must learn to account for the propagation of uncertainty from one step to the next. The propagation of uncertainty depends on the type of arithmetic operation performed on...