Effect of nitric oxide synthase inhibitor l-NAME on fear extinction in rats: A task-dependent effect

•l-NAME impaired fear extinction in ABB design. A or B represented different context.•l-NAME did not impair fear extinction of rats in AAA and ABA design.•The deficit of extinction was not due to state-dependency effects or motor deficits.•The effects of l-NAME were specific to certain aspects of the learning experience. There is increasing evidence that nitric oxide may be involved in learning and memory. However, there remain comparatively few studies that have explored the relationship between nitric oxide signaling and fear extinction, an inhibitory learning model. In the present study, we tested the effects of nitric oxide synthase inhibitor l-NAME on three tone fear extinction tasks in rats. In task 1, rats received fear conditioning, extinction training and extinction test in the same context (AAA design). In task 2, rats received fear conditioning in context A, extinction training in context B and extinction test in context A (ABA design). In task 3, rats received fear conditioning in context A, extinction training and extinction test in context B (ABB design). l-NAME (10, 20 and 40mg/kg) was injected intraperitoneally 30min prior to extinction training in each task. Percent of time spent freezing was used to measure conditioned fear response. We found that l-NAME administrations had no effect on freezing in task 1 and 2 but produced a dose-dependent increase in task 3. Further results indicated that the increased freezing in task 3 was not attributed to state-dependency effects or nonspecific changes of locomotor activity that followed l-NAME injection. These results showed that l-NAME produced a task-dependent impairment of fear extinction, and implied that nitric oxide signaling was involved in memory process of certain extinction tasks.