A different recruitment of the lateral and basolateral amygdala promotes contextual or elemental conditioned association in Pavlovian fear conditioning
Year: 2005
Type: preprint
Abstract: Convergent data suggest dissociated roles for the lateral (LA) and basolateral (BLA) amygdaloid nuclei in fear conditioning, depending on whether a discrete conditioned stimulus (CS)-unconditional stimulus (US) or context-US association is considered. Here, we show that pretraining inactivation of the BLA selectively impaired conditioning to context. In contrast, inactivation of the LA disrupted conditioning to the discrete tone CS, but also either impaired or enhanced contextual conditioning, depending on whether the context was in the foreground or in the background. Hence, these findings refine the current model of the amygdala function in emotional learning by showing that the BLA and the LA not only differentially contribute to elemental and context-US association, but also promote, through their interaction, the most relevant of these two associations.
Source: Learning & Memory
DOI: 10.1101/lm.92305
Language: English
Topic: Memory and Neural Mechanisms
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2031471928