Dorsal hippocampal contributions to unimodal contextual conditioning.

Full Abstract

Although there is general consensus that the hippocampus is not critically involved in the acquisition of fear conditioned to an explicit conditioned stimulus (CS), the extent to which the hippocampus participates in contextual fear conditioning remains unclear. To further characterize the potential role of the hippocampus in contextual fear conditioning, the present experiments examined the effect of excitotoxic lesions of dorsal hippocampus on the acquisition of a novel contextual fear conditioning paradigm in which a unimodal (olfactory) cue served to disambiguate discrete "contexts" within a single behavioral training chamber. Selective lesions of dorsal hippocampus severely attenuated olfactory contextual conditioning without affecting conditioning to an explicit auditory or olfactory CS. Additional experiments indicate that these contextual conditioning deficits cannot be attributed to a lesion-induced decrement in olfactory perception, a preferential impairment of "weak" forms of conditioning, or hyperactivity. Thus, the hippocampus appears to contribute importantly to the acquisition of fear conditioned to explicitly nonspatial, unimodal, temporally, and spatially diffuse contextual stimuli.

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Author information

Author/s: Otto, Tim (T); Poon, Patrick (P);

Affiliation: Program in Behavioral Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08854, USA. totto(-atsign-)rci.rutgers.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Journal Article; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

Journal: The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience (J Neurosci), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2006-Jun; vol 26 (issue 24) : pp 6603-9

Dates: Created 2006/06/15; Completed 2006/07/11; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 16775148, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Acoustic Stimulation - methods
Analysis of Variance
Animals
Association Learning - physiology
Behavior, Animal
Conditioning (Psychology) - physiology
Fear

Freezing Reaction, Cataleptic - physiology
Hippocampus - physiology
Male
Motor Activity - physiology
Olfactory Pathways - physiology
Rats
Rats, Sprague-Dawley

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