Herry et al. (2008) & Reznikov et al. (2014)

The article by Herry et al. was a bit confusing for me. After spending time with it, it made sense for the most part, however, there we parts that I could not figure out. Some of the behavioral paradigms didn’t make much sense to me and it was difficult for me to see why they set up the experiments the way they did, especially with very little information explaining in the text. Despite this, I found the article interesting, yet not completely convincing. I believe this is mostly due to the fact that I had trouble wrapping my mind around some things, but I feel they may have made some chancy claims. They said that they demonstrated the reversal of “…fear-conditioning-induced behavioural discrimination between the CS+ and the CS-,…”, but the frequency of the neurons in Figure 1d did not return to base level. In this case, they only saw the disappearance of a reaction to the tone. This also makes me wonder why the neurons were more active in general during extinction as compared to habituation.

I found the paper by Reznikov et al. much more understandable. Though it’s possible that this is due to the fact that I am more familiar with their methods and have experience reading this type of study, they also seemed to make every effort to make their research clear and extremely concise. Personally, I found the study very interesting and was convinced by the end of the paper that there are most likely ways to pre-determine rats that, when exposed to a stressful event, will be unable to extinguish as well as counterparts. My one major question for the authors is why they didn’t conduct behavioral tests in experiment 2 after conducting fear-conditioning and extinction to compare the behavioral results to the ones they got before. I think it’d be interesting to see if there were any significant differences between strong-extinction rats before and after as well as within group assessments for the weak-extinction rats and any interactions between groups. In addition, I think it would be very interesting to see where research in the field went/will go from here because I find the topic of genetic predispositions to PTSD fascinating.