Topic: adaptive defensive behaviors

Animals encounter several dangerous situations during their lives, in response to which appropriate defensive responses are essential for survival. The selection of a proper defensive response to cope with each dangerous encounter relies not only on the recognition of specific threat characteristics and its context, but also on the detection of features shared by different threats. With a novel paradigm that exposes mice to multiple threatening situations, we recently demonstrated that neuronal populations in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) encode both a general danger state and spec