Schedule of Events | Symposia

Examining Learned Associations Between Contextual Cues and Stress-Inducing Experiences

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Ella Reinders¹ (ellar2@umbc.edu), Olivia Edoigiawerie¹, Tyler Nguyen¹, Maya Tondravi¹, Se Rin Lee¹, Eden Beyene¹, Tara LeGates^1,2; ¹University of Maryland, Baltimore County, ²University of Maryland School of Medicine

The ability to associate stress-inducing stimuli with contextual information is important for survival, but it remains unclear how the brain integrates this information to guide behavior. We used a behavioral paradigm, Conditioned Place Aversion (CPA), where mice learn to associate contextual cues in a two-chamber arena with an ethologically relevant aversive stimuli, restraint. To determine what brain regions may be responsible for mediating this behavior, we used immunohistochemistry to measure cFos expression, allowing us to visualize the brain regions that are activated during various restraint-context pairings. Mice were either placed in the CPA chamber and allowed to roam freely, restrained in the CPA chamber, restrained in their home cage for 30 minutes, or left undisturbed in their home cage prior to collecting brain samples. We focused on the hippocampus CA1 region, medial nucleus accumbens, and basolateral amygdala due to their prominent roles in contextual learning and memory, motivated behaviors, and fear. In the nucleus accumbens and basolateral amygdala, the mice had a significant increase in cFos expression after restraint in the CPA arena. In the ventral hippocampus, mice exposed to the arena with or without restraint showed a significant increase in cFos expression, in line with the hippocampus’s role in processing new contextual information in the environment. Overall, these findings suggest that all three hypothesized brain regions play a prominent role in CPA behavior, with the ventral hippocampus facilitating contextual processing. Our findings help to advance understanding of the neurobiological basis of stress with implications for understanding stress-related neuropsychiatric disorders.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Multisensory