Fear changes how the brain processes innocuous information

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People who suffer from anxiety disorders essentially treat the world as a dangerous place. They exhibit exaggerated fear responses to trauma or phobia-related cues. Little is known, however, about how they process innocuous cues or information encountered in the course of everyday experience. Recent evidence shows that a state of fear shifts the processing of innocuous information from cortical to subcortical brain regions in the rat. This project originates in these novel findings and aims to identify what this cortical-to-subcortical shift means for processing of innocuous information and whether it can be reversed by treatments that eliminate fear. The project aims to shed light on how fear regulates information processing in anxiety disorders.