Topic: fear of heights

An animal’s ability to evaluate environmental threats and mount an appropriate behavioral response is critical to survival. Based on previous literature in rodents and humans, we developed a novel rodent fear of heights task which is highly controllable and can be used to interrogate neural computations underlying innate threat processing. We developed a virtual height threat task in which animals are placed on a pole and must choose to exit to either a “close” or “far” virtual platform. We find that animals perform around chance levels when the discrepancy between visual stimuli is small (5cm