Sepsis survivor mice do not show a deficit in contextual fear conditioning or trace fear conditioning 50 days after CLP, but do demonstrate impaired extinction of conditioned fear.

<p>A: In a contextual fear conditioning paradigm, mice were placed in a defined context for 180 s (white bar) at rest. A tone was played for 30 s (gray bar), followed immediately by a foot shock (star). In the trace fear conditioning paradigm, a 30 s delay is introduced after the tone and before the administration of the foot shock. B: In contextual fear conditioning, there is no difference between the rate at which sepsis survivor and control mice associated the freezing response with the context. C: After three days of training, there was no difference in the response of post-CLP and control mice to the tone alone in a novel context. D: There was no difference among post-CLP and control mice in the freezing response to the conditioned context. E-G. In the trace fear conditioning paradigm, there were also no differences among groups in the acquisition of the freezing response, response to tone, or response to context. H. Post-CLP mice demonstrate increased freezing in the conditioned context compared to sham-operated and unoperated mice during repeated exposures without foot shock, indicated a deficit in extinction learning.