Functional Changes Of VTA GABAergic Neurons Under Looming Stimulation

While facing some danger signals,animals often exhibit a inherent behavioral pattern,such as flighting and freezing.For that is closely related to human's fear emotions,those phenomena were believed that would contributed to understand humen's fear emotions and their mechanisms.However,in explaining these phenomena,past studies have tended to focus more on the stimulus or the mechanism behind the behavior and less on the other changes about the animal's brain state.Following some theories of pioneers,this study will use electrophysiological techniques to record the changes in the ventral tegmental area of animals under the condition of visual innate fear.This area is important in this study because it has long been thought to be highly correlated with emotional state of brain.On the one hand,it has a lot contributions to reward behaviors;on the other hand,it is involved in various phenomena or functions of the brain,such as time coding,anxiety and prediction.In this way,the ventral tegmental region becomes an area of multimodal information integration.In this study,after analyzing the recorded datas,it was found by us that the ventral tegmental area was indeed involved in the brain transformation under the visual innate fear stimulate.At the same time,we found that various neurons in this area responded differently to visual innate fear stimuli,what suggest that the ventral tegmental area may be involved in the calculation of external stimuli.