Surviving threats in the environment requires brain circuits for detecting (or anticipating) danger and for coordinating appropriate defensive responses (e.g., increased cardiac output, stress hormone release, and freezing behavior). The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) is a critical interface between the "affective…

Pavlovian fear conditioning is a robust and enduring form of emotional learning that provides an ideal model system for studying contextual regulation of memory retrieval. After extinction the expression of fear conditional responses (CRs) is context-specific: A conditional stimulus (CS) elicits greater conditional responding outside compared with…