Ethograms predict visual fear conditioning status in rats
- Boston College, United States
Abstract
Recognizing and responding to threat cues is essential to survival. Freezing is a predominant threat behavior in rats. We have recently shown that a threat cue can organize diverse behaviors beyond freezing, including locomotion (Chu et al., 2024). However, that experimental design was complex, required many sessions, and had rats receive many foot shock presentations. Moreover, the findings were descriptive. Here, we gave female and male Long Evans rats cue light illumination paired or unpaired with foot shock (8 total) in a conditioned suppression setting, using a range of shock intensities (0.15, 0.25, 0.35, or 0.50 mA). We found that conditioned suppression was only observed at higher foot shock intensities (0.35 mA and 0.50 mA). We constructed comprehensive temporal ethograms by scoring 22,272 frames across 12 behavior categories in 200-ms intervals around cue light illumination. The 0.50 mA and 0.35 mA shock-paired visual cues suppressed reward seeking, rearing, and scaling, as well as light-directed rearing and light-directed scaling. The shock-paired visual cue further elicited locomotion and freezing. Linear discriminant analyses showed that ethogram data could accurately classify rats into paired and unpaired groups. Using complete ethogram data produced superior classification compared to behavior subsets, including an Immobility subset featuring freezing. The results demonstrate diverse threat behaviors – in a short and simple procedure – containing sufficient information to distinguish the visual fear conditioning status of individual rats.
Data availability
Raw frames and scored behaviors have been deposited: doi:10.7910/DVN/Z4YJRJ
Article and author information
Author details
Michael A McDannald
Funding
National Institutes of Health (R01-MH117791)
- Michael A McDannald
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: Animal care was in accordance with NIH and Boston College guidelines. The Boston College experimental protocol supporting these procedures is 2024-001.
Copyright
© 2025, Williams et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Ethograms predict visual fear conditioning status in rats
eLife 14:e102782.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.102782
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