ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Social reactivation of fear engrams enhances memory recall.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Divergent BLA engram circuits orchestrate social preference dynamics in bystander male mice with self-experienced stress.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Dentate Gyrus Engrams in Fear and Reward: Mechanistic Principles, Critical Gaps, and Paths to Translation.Journal of neurochemistry · 2026Review
- Integrating Aversive Memories in the Basolateral Amygdala.Biological psychiatry · 2025Review
- Stress induces distinct social behavior states encoded by the ventral hippocampus.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Remission from addiction: erasing the wrong circuits or making new ones?Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Article
- Memory circuits in dementia: The engram, hippocampal neurogenesis and Alzheimer's disease.Progress in neurobiology · 2024Review
- Characterizing the mechanisms of social connection.Neuron · 2023Review
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
For group-living animals, the social environment provides salient experience that can weaken or strengthen aspects of cognition such as memory recall. Although the cellular substrates of individually acquired fear memories in the dentate gyrus (DG) and basolateral amygdala (BLA) have been well-studied and recent work has revealed circuit mechanisms underlying the encoding of social experience, the processes by which social experience interacts with an individual’s memories to alter recall remain unknown. Here we show that stressful social experiences enhance the recall of previously acquired fear memories in male but not female mice, and that social buffering of conspecifics’ distress blocks this enhancement. Activity-dependent tagging of cells in the DG during fear learning revealed that these ensembles were endogenously reactivated during the social experiences in males, even after extinction. These reactivated cells were shown to be functional components of engrams, as optogenetic stimulation of the cells active during the social experience in previously fear-conditioned and not naïve animals was sufficient to drive fear-related behaviors. Taken together, our findings suggest that social experiences can reactivate preexisting engrams to thereby strengthen discrete memories.
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