While considerable evidence implicates NMDA receptors in the hippocampus in contextual fear conditioning, the role of other brain regions is less well understood. To further investigate this issue, rats were subjected to a contextual fear conditioning task and then classified as high or low responders according to performance. Density of NMDA receptors was evaluated using [3H]MK-801 autoradiogr...

The conditioning tasks have been widely used to model fear and anxiety and to study their association with sleep. Many reports suggest that sleep plays a vital role in the consolidation of fear memory. Studies have also demonstrated that fear-conditioning influences sleep differently in mice strains having a low or high anxiety level. It is, therefore, necessary to know, how sleep influences fe...

The dorsal and ventral subregions of the hippocampus likely play dissociable roles in some forms of learning. For example, we have previously demonstrated that temporary inactivation of ventral, but not dorsal, hippocampus dramatically impaired the acquisition of trace fear conditioning, while temporary inactivation of dorsal, but not ventral, hippocampus impaired spatially guided reinforced al...

Several studies have implicated the Ras/mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway in Pavlovian fear conditioning. RasGRF1 knockout mice show significant deficits in acquisition of long-term fear memories and long-term potentaition (LTP) in the basolateral amygdala (BLA). MAPK kinase inhibition also impairs fear conditioning and amygdaloid LTP. However, there is no direct evidence to date ...

The ventral portion of medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) is involved in contextual fear-conditioning expression in rats. In the present study, we investigated the role of local N-methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) glutamate receptors and nitric oxide (NO) in vMPFC on the behavioral (freezing) and cardiovascular (increase of arterial pressure and heart rate) responses of rats exposed to a context fear...

Learning processes mediating conditioning and extinction of contextual fear require activation of several key signaling pathways in the hippocampus. Principal hippocampal CA1 neurons respond to fear conditioning by a coordinated activation of multiple protein kinases and immediate early genes, such as cFos, enabling rapid and lasting consolidation of contextual fear memory. The extracellular si...

Objective(s): Behavioral and neuroimaging studies have shown that transcranial direct current stimulation, as a non-invasive neuromodulatory technique, beyond regional effects can modify functionally interconnected remote cortical and subcortical areas. In this study, we hypothesized that the induced changes in cortical excitability following the application of cathodal or anodal tDCS over the ...

We have shown previously that electrolytic lesions of the dorsal hippocampus (DH) produce a severe deficit in contextual fear if made 1 d, but not 28 d, after fear conditioning (). As such, the hippocampus seems to play a time-limited role in the consolidation of contextual fear conditioning. Here, we examine retrograde amnesia of contextual fear produced by DH lesions in a within-subjects desi...

We report that post-training inactivation of basolateral amygdala region (BLA) with muscimol impaired memory for contextual-fear conditioning (as measured by freezing) and intra-BLA norepinephrine enhanced this memory. However, pre-exposure to the context eliminated both of these effects. These findings provide a likely explanation of why an earler study failed to observe that the BLA modulates...