Male rats lose their ability to filter out background noise after a single scary experience, but female rats keep their sensory focus perfectly intact.
April 26, 2026
Original Paper
Sex-dependent impairment of sensorimotor gating following fear conditioning
SSRN · 6636990
The Takeaway
Fear conditioning reveals a fundamental biological divide in how different brains process acute stress. After a stressful event, male subjects suffer from a total breakdown in sensory filtering that makes them hypersensitive to every irrelevant sound or movement. Female subjects maintain stable inhibitory functions and continue to filter out distractions even when they are under pressure. This difference suggests that the neurological pathways for managing trauma and attention are sex-dependent. Medical treatments for anxiety and sensory processing disorders likely need to be tailored to these distinct biological responses to stress.
From the abstract
Prepulse inhibition (PPI) and facilitation (PPF) are startle modulation mechanisms linked to pre-attentive and directed attention. While these processes are highly sensitive to emotional states, the role of associative learning in influencing these modulatory phenomena remains poorly understood. Therefore, this study investigated how fear conditioning modulates PPI and PPF in male and female Wistar rats (N=48) by pairing either prepulses or pulses with electric footshocks. We hypothesized cue-sp