Effects of Within-Litter Variation in Maternal Care on Hippocampus-Dependent Task Performance in Adult Rats

Post-weaning social environment shapes reward learning, social hierarchy, and pCREB signaling in adult male rats exposed to early-life adversity.

Adverse experiences during early life are known to disrupt neuronal development and maturation of reward circuits, affecting both social behavior and responses to reward-predicting stimuli. We have previously demonstrated that rats exposed during early life to denial of expected reward in the form of maternal contact (...

Differential Retrieval of Contextual Fear-Conditioned Memory in Adolescent and Adult Rats.

While adult rats showed a significant increase in freezing behavior 24hours after training, adolescent rats exhibited greater freezing behavior when tested 10 days post-training, highlighting the developmental changes in fear and anxiety processing associated with the maturation of the hippocampus and amygdala.

Neonatal handling shapes the adult development of social behavior in rats: enduring effects after prolonged social deprivation.

Neonatal handling is an early-life intervention known to produce long-lasting reductions in emotional reactivity and physiological responses to stress in rodents. Although its effects on social behavior remain less well characterized, previous studies have shown that neonatal handling enhances juvenile play behavior, s...

EARLY-LIFE STRESS INDUCES SEXUALLY DIMORPHIC BRAIN AGING VIA MESOLIMBIC ALTERATIONS AND FRONTO-STRIATAL DYSFUNCTION

Male and Female Mice Show Similar Fear Memory Performance Despite Hippocampal Immediate Early Gene Expression Differences During Encoding and Consolidation

Highlights What are the main findings? Male and female mice perform similarly in a well-studied experimental memory task, contextual fear memory (CFM). In the absence of significant behavioral differences, male and female mice show differing hippocampal cFos expression patterns during CFM processing. What is the implic...

Individual behavioral signatures shape processing of context-dependent social fear

Context processing is an essential function in the cognitive repertoire of numerous species, including humans and mice, allowing them to learn from their environment and adapt their future behavior. Impairments or alterations in context processing are hypothesized to represent one of the core etiological mechanisms und...