Figure 1

White noise promotes defensive behavior after fluid percussion injury and contributes to enhanced contextual fear learning when paired with footshocks. (A) Experimental design. (B) During noise pre-exposure with presentations of white noise cues in the absence of footshocks, FPI (fluid percussion injury) groups froze significantly more than shams and (C) to an even greater degree at the offset and during the intervals between trials. (D) When white noise was paired with footshocks, both groups increased freezing across trials indicating learning, however the FPI group was not different than sham. (E) Freezing in the conditioning context was robustly increased in the FPI groups across three days of testing. Both groups decreased freezing across days, indicating contextual fear extinction. (F) When tested in a novel context there were no group differences in freezing to the white noise cue. ***p < 0.001 vs. Sham; data are represented as mean ± SEM.