Ramirez et al.

I personally did not like the way in which Ramirez et al. was written and as I thought without the structure that many of the other articles had; separating methodology, results etc. it was a bit unstructured and personally for me it made it a lot harder to read. I thought the context however was extremely interesting, especially as we covered optogenetics in class and so I could understand the background a lot more clearly. I liked how they included many control groups to reinforce the results, which I think is extremely important when the articles aim is so specific. I thought the experiments were convincing, but hard to decipher the information from the article to each stage of the experiments as it all seemed to get blended into one quite a lot.

I liked figure 1 a lot as it set out the stage for the understanding of the rest of the article, and I think without it the article would be all too challenging to grasp. The use of optogenetics to show fear memory in context was really interesting and I thought it was a really apt approach to be used with respect to PTSD as they showed where perhaps fear could be reduced and where fear is expressed, both quintessentially important to PTSD research.

This was my favorite of the two articles because I found the content to link more to what we have discussed in class, bringing more clarity to articles I find very difficult to understand, but I much preferred the more straightforward structure of Yiu et al.