Pavlovian fear conditioning is a behavioral paradigm in which organisms learn to predict aversive events. It is a form of learning in which an aversive stimulus is associated with a particular neutral context or neutral stimulus, resulting in the expression of fear responses to the originally neutral stimulus or context. This can be done by pairing the neutral stimulus with an aversive stimulus. Eventually, the neutral stimulus alone can elicit the state of fear. In the vocabulary of classical conditioning, the neutral stimulus or context is the "conditional stimulus" (CS), the aversive stimulus is the "unconditional stimulus" (US), and the fear is the "conditional response" (CR).
Fear conditioning apparatus for mice equipped with a sound, a foot shock and an activity sensor with photobeams to measure freezing. Environment context can be changed. This apparatus is also used for PTSD studies.
including medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)
Classical conditioning is a behavioral procedure in which a biologically potent stimulus is paired with a neutral stimulus. The term classical conditioning refers to the process of an automatic, conditioned response that is paired with a specific stimulus.
Ivan Pavlov research on dog's reflex setup