Previous work has found that N-acetylcysteine inhibits extinction responding in rats trained to self-administer heroin. The current study examined the ability of N-acetylcysteine to inhibit extinction responding in rats trained to self-administer cocaine. Rats were trained to self-administer cocaine (0.39mg/kg) for 10 to 12 days and were pretreated with either N-acetylcysteine (60mg/kg) or sali...

Understanding how fears are acquired is an important step in translating basic research to the treatment of fear-related disorders. However, understanding how learned fears are diminished may be even more valuable. We explored the neural mechanisms of fear extinction in humans. Studies of extinction in nonhuman animals have focused on two interconnected brain regions: the amygdala and the ventr...

There is a growing body of evidence that the hippocampus is critical for context-dependent memory retrieval. In the present study, we used Pavlovian fear conditioning in rats to examine the role of the dorsal hippocampus (DH) in the context-specific expression of fear memory after extinction (i.e., renewal). Pre-training electrolytic lesions of the DH blunted the expression of conditional freez...

Recent studies demonstrate that context-specific memory retrieval after extinction requires the hippocampus. However, the contribution of hippocampal subfields to the context-dependent expression of extinction is not known. In the present experiments, we examined the roles of areas CA1 and CA3 of the dorsal hippocampus in the context specificity of extinction. After pairing an auditory conditio...

Pairing a previously neutral conditioned stimulus (CS; e.g., a tone) to an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US; e.g., a footshock) leads to associative learning such that the tone alone comes to elicit a conditioned response (e.g., freezing). We have previously shown that an extinction session that occurs within the reconsolidation window (termed retrieval + extinction) attenuates fear respondi...