The neurobiological bases of contextual memories come from paradigms involving negative stimuli, such as shock. However, memories of the same context can represent positive experiences, not just negative experiences. So, ...

Fear conditioning allows the accurate prediction of an aversive stimulus through its association with available environmental cues previously acquired. In addition to delay fear conditioning, in which events to be associated ...

Rodents exposed to social defeat stress exhibit hormonal, behavioral, and autonomic responses called defense reactions. This study sought to conduct a behavioral validation of a context aversion generated by social defeat ...

A task called contextual fear conditioning with temporal discontinuity (CFC-5s) was developed in our lab. In this task, the association between the context and the aversive stimulus is done discontinuously in time, with a ...

The central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) - a critical structure in emotional memory - projects to the substantia nigra pars compacta and retrorubral nucleus, both of which provide dopaminergic innervation to the dorsal ...

Caffeine, an antagonist of adenosine receptors, is one of the most widely consumed psychostimulant substance in the world. There are contradicting reports about the effect of caffeine on learning and memory. While some ...

Aggressive interactions between conspecific animals have been used as an ethological source of social stress to study some aspects of social anxiety. Through this work we used a new experimental protocol in order to ...