Tail of the Striatum's Activity in Aversive Conditioning

Averse conditioning, also known as fear conditioning, is a form of associative learning in which a mouse learns to associate a conditioned stimulus (an auditory stimulus) with an unconditioned stimulus (foot shock).The striatum is the main input source of the basal ganglia, a collection of subcortical nuclei that mediate learning, memory and decision making, and its role in aversive conditioning remains to be fully elucidated. Here, we seek to better understand the involvement of the tail of the striatum (TS) in auditory aversive conditioning by utilizing c-FOS immunohistochemistry to examine changes in its expression as a measure of neuronal activity following conditioning. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the neural circuitry underlying aversive and learning behaviors.