Pavlovian fear conditioning as a behavioral assay for hippocampus and amygdala function: cautions and caveats

Pavlovian fear conditioning has become an important model for investigating the neural substrates of learning and memory in rats, mice and humans. The hippocampus and amygdala are widely believed to be essential for fear conditioning to contexts and discrete cues, respectively. Indeed, this parsing...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The European journal of neuroscience 2008-10, Vol.28 (8), p.1661-1666
Main Author: Maren, Stephen
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amygdala - physiology
Animals
Anxiety Disorders - physiopathology
Behavior, Animal - physiology
behavioral assay
Biological Assay - methods
Conditioning (Psychology) - physiology
context
cue
Cues
Fear - physiology
fear responses
Hippocampus - physiology
Humans
learning
Neuropsychological Tests - standards
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Summary:Pavlovian fear conditioning has become an important model for investigating the neural substrates of learning and memory in rats, mice and humans. The hippocampus and amygdala are widely believed to be essential for fear conditioning to contexts and discrete cues, respectively. Indeed, this parsing of function within the fear circuit has been used to leverage fear conditioning as a behavioral assay of hippocampal and amygdala function, particularly in transgenic mouse models. Recent work, however, blurs the anatomical segregation of cue and context conditioning and challenges the necessity for the hippocampus and amygdala in fear learning. Moreover, nonassociative factors may influence the performance of fear responses under a variety of conditions. Caution must therefore be exercised when using fear conditioning as a behavioral assay for hippocampal‐ and amygdala‐dependent learning.
ISSN:0953-816X
1460-9568
DOI:10.1111/j.1460-9568.2008.06485.x