The basolateral amygdala (BLA) is critical for encoding the value of stimuli. Beyeler et al. (2016) now show that distinct populations of BLA neurons, which are defined by their efferent targets, code reward and aversion. This arrangement promotes parallel processing of biologically relevant events.

Orbitofrontal cortex is characterized by its unique pattern of connections with subcortical areas, such as basolateral amygdala. Here we distinguish between the critical role of these areas in associative learning and the pivotal contribution of OFC to the manipulation of this information to control behavior. This contribution reflects the ability of OFC to signal the desirability of expected o...

© 2012 Ferry and Quirarte, licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Role of Norepinephrine in Modulating Inhibitory Avoidance Memory Storage: Critic...

Previous studies have shown that the amygdala (AMG) plays a role in how affective signals are processed. Animal research has allowed this role to be better understood and has assigned to the basolateral amygdala (BLA) an important role in threat perception. Here we show that, when passively exposed to bodily threat signals during a facial expressions recognition task, humans with bilateral BLA ...

The amygdala is known to play a role in learning about motivationally significant events. We investigated this role further by examining the effects of excitotoxic lesions of the basolateral amygdala on the ability of rats to use instrumental outcomes to direct responding (the differential outcomes effect) and on the ability of Pavlovian cues to modulate instrumental performance based on shared...

Prediction about outcomes constitutes a basic mechanism underlying informed economic decision making. A stimulus constitutes a reward predictor when it provides more information about the reward than the environmental background. Reward prediction can be manipulated in two ways, by varying the reward paired with the stimulus, as done traditionally in neurophysiological studies, and by varying t...

To understand how the human amygdala contributes to associative learning, it is necessary to differentiate the contributions of its subregions. However, major limitations in the techniques used for the acquisition and analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data have hitherto precluded segregation of function with the amygdala in humans. Here, we used high-resolution fMRI in co...

Consolidated memories when reactivated may return to a state that requires protein synthesis in order to be restabilized (reconsolidation). It has been shown in a variety of systems that if reactivation induces significant extinction then extinction is the protein synthesis dependent memory state, rather than reconsolidation. Thus, extinction consolidation may prevent the memory from undergoing...

Rats with lesions in the basolateral amygdala chose different foods from control rats in 10-min. food-preference tests. The normal rats ate primarily familiar chow, while the amygdala-lesioned rats ate primarily novel foods. The lesioned rats did not select indiscriminately but showed definite preferences. With repeated testing, the normal rats' preferences became similar to those of the amygda...