Topic: Avoidance behavior

Coping with threatening situations requires both identifying stimuli predicting danger and selecting adaptive behavioral responses in order to survive. The dorso medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) is a critical structure involved in the regulation of threat-related behaviour, yet it is still largely unclear how threat-predicting stimuli and defensive behaviours are associated within prefrontal networks in order to successfully drive adaptive responses. To address these questions, we used a combination of extracellular recordings, neuronal decoding approaches, and optogenetic manipulations to sho

Coping with threatening situations requires both identifying stimuli predicting danger and selecting adaptive behavioral responses in order to survive. The dorso medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) is a critical structure involved in the regulation of threat-related behaviour, yet it is still largely unclear how threat-predicting stimuli and defensive behaviours are associated within prefrontal networks in order to successfully drive adaptive responses. To address these questions, we used a combination of extracellular recordings, neuronal decoding approaches, and optogenetic manipulations to sho

One-shot learning is a crucial mechanism for survival and adaptation, enabling rapid acquisition of knowledge from a single experience [1]. Here, we investigated the synaptic plasticity associated with one-shot learning in vivo, focusing on endocannabinoid-mediated long-term potentiation (eCB-LTP) at cortico-striatal synapses [2]. We recorded neural activity in the cortex and striatum of behaving mice subjected to an uncomfortable stimulus in an arena using Neuropixel probes. This task was designed to induce avoidance behavior after a single encounter of the stimulus, thus modeling one-shot le