Independence of Cued and Contextual Components of Fear Conditioning is Gated by the Lateral Habenula

Abstract

Fear is an extreme form of aversion that, if inappropriately generalized, initiates pathological conditions such as panic or anxiety. Fear conditioning (FC) is the best understood model of fear learning. During FC two independent associations link the cue and the training context to fear expression. The lateral habenula (LHb) is a general encoder of aversion. However, its role in fear learning has not been intensively studied. Here we studied the role of the LHb in FC using optogenetics and pharmacological tools in rats. Disrupting the neuronal activity of the LHb during training abolishes the expression of fear to isolated presentation of the training context or the cue, yet the recall of both associations when the cue is played in the training context reveals a conserved memory. Our results demonstrate that the LHb is required for the formation of independently expressible contextual and cued memories, a previously uncharacterized role in FC.