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. 2016 Aug 10;41(13):3092–3102. doi: 10.1038/npp.2016.127

Figure 1.

Figure 1

(a) Timeline for experiment 1. (b) All rats were fear-conditioned and assigned to groups such that the groups had similar levels of freezing before beginning stress or control treatments. (c) The two extinction treatment groups (CUS and unstressed control) received a single extinction training session on day 17, 24 h before testing on the attentional set-shifting test (AST). Extinction was comparable in the two groups (area under the curves, p>0.65); n=14 per group. (d) Extinction treatment reversed the chronic stress-induced deficit in cognitive flexibility on the extradimensional set-shifting task of the AST. CUS induced a significant increase in trials required to meet criterion (TTC) on the set-shifting task (*p<0.05, CUS compared with unstressed controls in the nonextinction groups). Extinction treatment reversed the effect of stress, restoring TTC to unstressed control levels (+p<0.05, extinction treatment compared with nonextinction in the CUS groups); n=14–15 per group. (e) Timeline for experiment 2, for which the CUS procedure included footshock. (f) In experiment 2, the group undergoing fear conditioning displayed freezing behavior comparable to that seen in experiment 1. Note that in experiment 2, tone controls were exposed to the extinction procedure but were not fear-conditioned. (g) Extinction treatment was administered on day 17, 24 h before testing on the AST. Extinction was comparable to that seen in experiment 1. The two tone control groups that were not fear-conditioned showed comparably low levels of freezing during tone presentation (not shown). (h) Again, extinction treatment reversed the chronic stress-induced deficit in cognitive flexibility on the extradimensional set-shifting task of the AST. CUS induced a significant increase in TTC on the set-shifting task (*p<0.05, CUS tone controls compared with unstressed tone controls). Extinction treatment reversed the effect of stress, restoring TTC to unstressed control levels (+p<0.05, CUS-extinction compared with CUS-tone controls); n=3–4 per group. In all panels, data are expressed as mean±SEM.