Foot shock facilitates reward seeking in an experience-dependent manner.

Animals organize reward seeking around aversive events. An abundance of research shows that foot shock, as well as a shock-associated cue, can elicit freezing and suppress reward seeking. Yet, there is evidence that experience can flip the effect of foot shock to facilitate reward seeking. Here we examined cue suppression, foot shock suppression and foot shock facilitation of reward seeking in a single behavioural setting. Male Long Evans rats received fear discrimination consisting of danger, uncertainty, and safety cues. Discrimination took place over a baseline of rewarded nose poking. With limited experience (1-2 sessions), all cues and foot shock suppressed reward seeking. With continued experience (10-16 sessions), suppression became specific to shock-associated cues, foot shock briefly suppressed, then facilitated reward seeking. Our results provide a means of assessing positive properties of foot shock, and may provide insight into maladaptive behaviour around aversive events.

Impact conditions in side-impact collisions with fixed roadside objects.

Designing vehicles and roadside structures that are safer in side-impact collisions is an emerging area of concern in roadside safety research. Selecting impact conditions that are relevant to the way side-impact collisions occur in real world collisions is an important part of developing effective full-scale crash test procedures and evaluation criteria. If test impact conditions are unrealistically severe, improving the performance of roadside hardware for side-impacts may appear unfeasible. If test impact conditions are not demanding enough, good performance in full-scale crash tests may not be indicative of good performance in real-world crashes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the best available accident data to determine what the reasonable worst case test impact conditions are for side-impacts with roadside objects.