Fig. 5. Summary of our findings.

a Fear learning is able to trigger structural reorganization over time between hippocampal and cortical structures. As a consequence of this systemic process, detailed fear memories are transformed into a more schematic state, inducing fear generalization (the inability to restrict the fear expression to appropriate predictors, causing fear and avoidance in response to harmless stimuli such as the novel context that is not directly associated with trauma). b Chronic fluoxetine treatment after contextual fear conditioning prevents fear generalization by maintaining fear memory dependency of the hippocampus. The mechanism underlying such process seems to be the remodeling of dendritic spines densities, especially the mushroom type in the CA1 region. Our findings suggest that manipulating the natural course of systems consolidation can be considered as a potential clinic strategy to treat fear-related disorders through its extinction facilitation