ArticleScience advances2025
A top-down insular cortex circuit crucial for non-nociceptive fear learning.
Article in Science advances, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Prefrontal-raphe-habenular circuit drives fear memory recall and updating.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Sustained hyperactivity of parasubthalamic nucleus by PACAP signaling mediates stress-induced anxiety.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Merkel cell stimulation in fear and sensory signaling.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Understanding how threats drive fear memory formation is crucial to understanding how organisms adapt to environments and treat threat-related disorders such as PTSD. While traditional Pavlovian conditioning studies have provided valuable insights, the exclusive reliance on electric shock as a threat stimulus has limited our understanding of diverse threats. To address this, we developed a conditioning paradigm using a looming visual stimulus as an unconditioned stimulus (US) in mice and identified a distinct neural circuit for visual threat conditioning. Parabrachial CGRP neurons were necessary for both conditioning and memory retrieval. Upstream neurons in the posterior insular cortex (pIC) responded to looming stimuli, and their projections to the parabrachial nucleus (PBN) induced aversive states and drove conditioning. However, this pIC-to-PBN pathway was not required for foot-shock conditioning. These findings reveal how non-nociceptive visual stimuli can drive aversive states and fear memory formation, expanding our understanding of aversive US processing beyond traditional models.
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Registered trials
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