Neuronal encoding of the switch from specific to generalized fear

Fear memories are crucial for survival. However, excessive generalization of such memories, characterized by a failure to discriminate dangerous from safe stimuli, is common in anxiety disorders. Researchers identified distinct neuronal populations in the amygdala that signaled generalized versus cue-specific associations and determined how their distributions switched during fear generalization. These results provide a cellular basis in the amygdala for the alteration of emotional states from n