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Intuitively, it seems unlikely that infants have sufficient cognitive capacity to incorporate a mother's fears from environmental cues. To test this possibility, researchers conducted fear-conditioning experiments in female rats and young pups.
Before breeding, rats either were or were not conditioned to a foot shock (unconditioned stimulus [US]) paired with peppermint odor (conditioned stimulus [CS]). At about age 1 week, pups and mothers were exposed or not exposed to the CS. CS-exposed pups of fear-conditioned mothers showed aversion to the peppermint odor, unlike CS-exposed pups of control mothers and nonexposed pups of fear-conditioned mothers. To test whether behaviors of fear-conditioned mothers might affect results, researchers teste…