Fear conditioning is the method by which animals learn to fear new stimuli. It is a form of learning in which fear is associated with a particular neutral context (e.g. a room) or neutral stimulus (e.g. a tone). This can be done by pairing the neutral stimulus with an aversive stimulus (e.g. a shock). Eventually, the neutral stimulus alone can elicit the state of fear.

The ANY-maze fear conditioning system uses the two most common fear conditioning paradigms: contextual fear conditioning and acoustically-cued fear conditioning.

The system can be supplied with a low-cost, fear conditioning specific version of ANY-maze which automatically detects freezing and reports: total freezing time, number of freezing episodes, duration of freeing episodes and latency between stimuli and freezing. The software also controls the stimuli and allows the user complete flexibility in designing the experiment's protocol. Of course, the full range of ANY-maze's results reports and analysis are also available.