Defensive behaviours

Defensive behaviours are a range of strategies that an organism employs to cope with threatening stimuli. In social animals like mice, threats can be in the form of aggressive conspecifics, competing for territory and resources for male mice, or unwanted social interactions, like sexual advances from unfamiliar males for female mice. These aversive situations can be de-escalated by the avoidance of the threat, displaying submissive postures or even by defensive attack. The ventrolateral subdivision of the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMHvl) has been shown to be essential for the expression of bo

…how threat-predicting stimuli and defensive behaviours are associated within prefrontal networks in order to successfully drive adaptive responses. Over the past years, we used a combination we used a combination of extracellular recordings, neuronal decoding approaches, and state of the art

…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

…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