Assessing conditioned suppression in Long Evans rats with or without manipulations of the ventral pallidum

Ninety‑four Long Evans rats (47 females) participated across three experiments investigating minimal threat learning and the neural circuitry underlying fear‐related suppression of reward seeking. In Experiment 1 (47 rats, 23 females), subjects, divided into 3 groups corresponding with differing levels of food shock probability (10%, 20%, or 30%), underwent ten 49‑minute sessions in which 20 randomized trials were presented per session using two auditory cues during which the threat cue was paired with a 0.5‑s, 0.5‑mA foot shock on 10%, 20%, or 30% of its presentations, while a neutral cue was never paired with foot shock. In Experiments 2 (23 rats, 11 females) and 3 (24 rats, 12 females), subjects received dual viral AAV infusions targeting the ventral pallidum in Experiment 2, and both the ventral pallidum and nucleus accumbens core in Experiment 3. All rats received viral infusions of eSyn-iCre-T2A-eGFP-WPRE (rAAV2-retro) and either AAV-flex-taCasp3-TEVp (deletion rats) or AAV-hSyn-mCherry (control rats) in Experiment 2, or AAV-flex-taCasp2-TEVp (deletion rats) or AAV-EF1a-DIO-mCherry (control rats) in Experiment 3. Fear conditioning took place over a baseline of reward seeking. This data set consists of 1,128 MATLAB files, corresponding to the 1,128 single trials over the three experiments (564 Experiment 1, 276 Experiment 2, 288 Experiment 3). Each MATLAB file contains the name of the program used, subject information, and time stamps for reward delivery, nose poke, cue presentation and shock delivery.