Background: Flight and freezing are two vital defensive behaviors that mice display to avoid natural enemies. When they are exposed to innate threats, visual cues are processed and transmitted by the visual system into the emotional nuclei and finally transmitted to the periaqueductal gray (PAG) to induce defensive behaviors. However, how the dorsal PAG (dPAG) encodes the two defensive behaviors is unclear.Methods: Multi-array electrodes were implanted in the dPAG nuclei of C57BL/6 mice.Two kinds of visual stimuli (looming and sweeping) were used to induce defensive behaviors in mice. Neural signals under different defense behaviors were recorded, and the encoding characteristics of the two behaviors were extracted and analyzed from spike firing and frequency oscillations. Finally, synchronization of neural activity during the defense process was analyzed.

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