Pattern separation of fear extinction memory
- 1Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Dell Medical School, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA
- 2Institute for Neuroscience, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA
- 3Department of Neuroscience, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA
- Corresponding author: patrick.laing{at}austin.utexas.edu
Abstract
While fear generalizes widely, extinction is stimulus-specific. Using a hybrid conditioning/episodic memory paradigm, subjects encoded nonrepeating category exemplars during fear conditioning and extinction. Twenty-four hours later, a surprise memory test included old, similar, and novel category exemplars. Results showed strong dissociation between pattern completion (generalization) and pattern separation (discrimination) in episodic memory for items encoded during fear conditioning versus extinction, respectively. These data suggest that directly threat-conditioned stimuli are better recognized at the expense of mnemonic precision, whereas discrimination is enhanced for extinguished stimuli. Overly precise extinction memory may be a contributing factor to fear relapse.
Footnotes
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[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
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Article is online at http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/lm.053760.123.
- Received March 17, 2023.
- Accepted June 13, 2023.
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