Fight Or Flight In The Amygdala | Experiential Learning Psychology Of Males Vs. Females | FPS#3

The amygdala is a prominent brain region known for its involvement in learning and memory in emotional situations including during fear, anxiety, and pleasure - including its activation in the fight or flight response. However, this psychology related research has taken place almost exclusively in laboratory environments with limited ability to generalize to natural settings that rodents would be instinctually prepared to learn in. How the amygdala processes this information in more natural environments has not been explored.

In Episode #3 of First-Person Science, PhD Candidate Peter Zambetti from the University of Washington speaks on his recently published manuscript in iScience. Using instinctual fear stimuli (a 3D owl) rather than the classic foot-shock, Dr. Zambetti aims to better understand innate defensive behaviors.

"S*ex Differences in Foraging Rats to Naturalistic Aerial Predator Stimuli", published in iScience from CellPress [Volume 16, 28 June 2019, Pages 442-452] / DOI:10.1016/j.isci.2019.06.011.
Open Access Article link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004219301932

Manuscript Abstract:
Rodents in the wild are under nearly constant threat of aerial predation and thus have evolved adaptive innate defensive behaviors, such as freezing or fleeing, in response to a perceived looming threat. Here we employed an ethologically relevant paradigm to study innate fear of aerial predators in male and female rats during a goal-oriented task. Rats foraging for food in a large arena encountered either a 2D or 3D looming stimulus, to which they instinctively fled back to a safe nest. When facing a direct aerial threat, female rats exhibited a greater fear response than males and this divergence maintained when exposed to the environment on subsequent days with no predator interaction, suggesting stronger contextual fear in female rats. These results may have relevance toward exploring neurobiological mechanisms associated with higher diagnosis rates of fear and anxiety-related disorders in women as compared with men.

Highlights
• Female rats exhibited stronger fear responses to aerial threats than male rats

• A 3D aerial predator was more effective at eliciting fear responses than 2D stimuli

• Contextual fear memories were formed from repeated 3D predator exposures

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