Increasing CREB in the auditory thalamus enhances memory and generalization of auditory conditioned fear
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although the lateral nucleus of the amygdala (LA) is essential for conditioned auditory fear memory, an emerging theme is that plasticity in multiple brain regions contributes to fear memory formation. The LA receives direct projections from the auditory thalamus, specifically the medial division of the medial geniculate nucleus (MGm) and adjacent posterior intralaminar nucleus (PIN). While traditionally viewed as a simple relay structure, mounting evidence implicates the thalamus in diverse cognitive processes. We investigated the role of plasticity in the MGm/PIN in auditory fear memory. First we found that auditory fear conditioning (but not control manipulations) increased the levels of activated CREB in both the MGm and PIN. Next, using viral vectors, we showed that exogenously increasing CREB in this region specifically enhanced formation of an auditory conditioned fear memory without affecting expression of an auditory fear memory, formation of a contextual fear memory, or basic auditory processing. Interestingly, mice with increased CREB levels in the MGm/PIN also showed broad auditory fear generalization (in contrast to control mice, they exhibited fear responses to tones of other frequencies). Together, these results implicate CREB-mediated plasticity in the MGm/PIN in both the formation and generalization of conditioned auditory fear memory. Not only do these findings refine our knowledge of the circuitry underlying fear memory but they also provide novel insights into the neural substrates that govern the degree to which acquired fear of a tone generalizes to other tones.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".