Evaluation of the weak and strong association conditioning paradigms in naïve mice (Experiment 1). (A) According to the schematic timeline, mice were handled, classically conditioned to associate the training context and cues (light and/or sound) with a foot shock, and tested for fear-associated freezing to the context or cues. Recall of the conditioned associations were measured as the percent fear-associated freezing in each minute over the five minute test. (B) In the trained context, hippocampal-dependent recall of the contextual conditioning is demonstrated as elevated and stable freezing. (C) In the novel context, the absence of generalized fear is demonstrated in the first two minutes before the conditioned cues are activated for the remaining time and show amygdala-dependent recall of the conditioning. (D) The activity suppression ratio indicates the extent of fear (0.0 = fear; 0.5 = no fear) normalized to each animal's baseline activity. †, p < 0.05 compared to context; *, p < 0.05 compared to weak association.