S-090
Inhibition of the oxytocinergic system impairs observational fear learning in mice
Emiliano Lower1,3, Valery Grinevich2, Verónica de la Fuente1,3
  1. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
  2. Department of Neuropeptide Research in Psychiatry, Central Institute of Mental Health, Medical Faculty Mannheim, University of Heidelberg, Mannheim, Germany
  3. Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias (IFIBYNE-UBA-CONICET), Argentina
Presenting Author:
Emiliano Lower
emilianolower123@gmail.com
In rodents, social learning refers to situations in which an individual learns from a conspecific in a vicarious manner. This is advantageous, as animals can avoid threatening situations without experiencing them directly. Oxytocin (OXT) is a neuropeptide involved in a wide range of social behaviors, including comfort, social reward, parental care, and discrimination of conspecifics’ emotional states. However, the role of OXT in social learning is poorly understood. A useful paradigm to study mechanisms underlying social learning is the observational fear learning (OFL) paradigm, in which a demonstrator undergoes cued fear conditioning while an observer associates the tone and context with the demonstrator’s distress, forming a long-term vicarious fear memory. Previous studies have shown that intranasal OXT or chemogenetic activation of hypothalamic oxytocinergic neurons enhances the freezing response of an observer witnessing its demonstrator undergo a fear conditioning. Nevertheless, the role of OXT in stabilizing long-term social learning memories remains unknown. Here, to investigate OXT’s role in OFL long-term memory formation, we inhibited the oxytocinergic system either systemically with intraperitoneal OXT receptor antagonist administration or locally through chemogenetic inhibition of hypothalamic paraventricular oxytocinergic neurons.Both approaches significantly disrupted the long-term freezing response, highlighting OXT’s critical role in modulating vicarious fear