title: Nicotine enhances both foreground and background contextual fear conditioning.
abstract: The present study examined if nicotine enhances contextual fear conditioning when the training context is either a background stimulus or a foreground stimulus. In the background conditioning experiment, mice were trained using two auditory conditioned stimulus (CS; 30 s, 85 dB white noise)-footshock unconditioned stimulus (US; 2 s, 0.57 mA) pairings and tested 24 h later. In the foreground conditioning experiment, mice were trained with two presentations of a footshock US (2 s, 0.57 mA) and tested 24 h later. Mice received 0.09 mg/kg nicotine before training and testing. For both the foreground and background conditioning experiments, nicotine enhanced contextual conditioning. No enhancement of the auditory CS-US association was seen. These results demonstrate that nicotine enhances contextual fear conditioning regardless of whether the context is a background stimulus or a foreground stimulus during conditioning.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Neuroscience Program, Weiss Hall, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA.
authors.forename: Jennifer A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Davis
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Porter
authors.forename: Thomas J
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Gould
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000818:Animals; D003216:Conditioning, Operant / Q000187:drug effects*; D004597:Electroshock; D005239:Fear / Q000523:psychology*; D008297:Male; D051379:Mice; D008810:Mice, Inbred C57BL; D009538:Nicotine / Q000494:pharmacology*; D018722:Nicotinic Agonists / Q000494:pharmacology*
chemical_list: D018722:Nicotinic Agonists; D009538:Nicotine