Fear Conditioning in an Automated Home Cage (DualCage) Environment

Fear conditioning is an important test in behavioral neuroscience to investigate the neural systems and molecular basis of various aspects of emotional learning across a wide range of species [1]. Dysfunction of the fear circuits is assumed to underlie mechanisms of affective disorders and is frequently investigated in rodent models. Traditional fear conditioning methods require frequent handling of the animals which compromises the accuracy with which fearrelated parameters such as the behavioral response and autonomic responses such as heart rate of the animal can be measured. We therefore developed a novel fully automated DualCage environment to explore the dynamics of fear conditioning during spontaneous/voluntary behavior of male C57BL/6J mice.