Neural Mechanisms of Startle Behavior

In the past fifteen years there has been considerable interest in neural circuits that initiate behavior patterns. For many types of behaviors, this involves decision-making circuits whose primary elements are neither purely sensory nor motor, but represent a higher order of neural processing. Of the large number of studies on such systems, analyses of startle circuits compose a major portion, and have been carried out on systems found throughout the animal kingdom. Startle has been an im­ ...