Temporal specificity of fear conditioning: effects of different conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus intervals on the fear-potentiated startle effect

Separate groups of rats were given 30 pairings of a light (conditioned stimulus, CS) and 500-ms shock (unconditioned stimulus, US) at CS-US intervals of 0, 25, 50, 100, 200, 800, 3,200, 12,800, or 51,200 ms. Other groups had lights and shocks inconsistently paired. The startle reflex was elicited 2-4 days later with a noise burst alone or 25-51,200 ms after light onset. After CS-US pairings over a wide range of intervals (25-51,200 ms), startle was potentiated in testing, sometimes as rapidly as 50 ms after light onset. Magnitude of potentiation and resistance to extinction were generally greater with longer CS-US intervals. In several groups, potentiation was maximal at a test interval that matched the CS-US interval used in training. This temporal specificity sharpened with increasing numbers of training trials but even occurred with a single training trial in which a 51,200-ms CS-US interval was used. The data indicate that even during simple fear conditioning, animals rapidly learn a temporal CS-US relationship. This has important implications for understanding the neural mechanisms of fear conditioning.