Stimulus salience determines defensive behaviors elicited by aversively conditioned serial compound auditory stimuli

Assessing the imminence of threatening events using environmental cues enables proactive engagement of appropriate avoidance responses. The neural processes employed to anticipate event occurrence depend upon which cue properties are used to formulate predictions. In serial compound stimulus (SCS) conditioning in mice, repeated presentations of sequential tone (CS1) and white noise (CS2) auditory stimuli immediately prior to an aversive event (US) produces freezing and flight responses to CS1 and CS2, respectively (Fadok et al., 2017). Recent work reported that these responses reflect learned temporal relationships of CS1 and CS2 to the US (Dong et al., 2019). However, we find that frequency and sound pressure levels, not temporal proximity to the US, are the key factors underlying SCS-driven conditioned responses. Moreover, white noise elicits greater physiological and behavioral responses than tones even prior to conditioning. Thus, stimulus salience is the primary determinant of behavior in the SCS paradigm, and represents a potential confound in experiments utilizing multiple sensory stimuli.