Topic: hippocampal inputs

Survival critically depends on the ability to detect threatening situations and in further selecting appropriate defensive behavior. This crucial mechanism contributed by contextual discrimination largely depends on the continuous evaluation of sensory cues that define the context. However, it may give rise to anxiety-related psychological disorders in situations of inaccurate context processing. We here aim to characterize neuronal determinants that allow the encoding and consolidation of contextual fear memory to successfully drive behavioral adaption, and mechanisms that especially induce c

Social behaviors are crucial for the survival and reproduction. However, little is known about how the brain computes choices when competing stimuli for mutually exclusive behaviors occur simultaneously. Aggression and feeding-related behaviors are regulated by the lateral septum (LS). We previously showed that somatostatin-expressing (Sst) neurons in the LS promote food-seeking (Carus-Cadavieco et al., Nature 2017). Here we investigated functions of the LS, Sst- and neurotensin-expressing (NT) cells, in social and feeding-related behaviors.We combined opto-, chemogenetics and calcium imaging