Monday, March 10, 2008

Plasticity underlying fear conditioning occurs in the BLA

Fanselow, M.S. & LeDoux, J.E. (June 1999). Why we think plasticity underlying Pavlovian fear conditioning occurs in the basolateral amygdala. Neuron, Vol. 23, 229-232.

A debate over the role of the neural plasticity in the amygdala has been ongoing. The 'encoding view' believes that neural plasticity in the basolateral complex of the amygdala (BLA) encodes the emotional component of memories formed during fear conditioning. The 'modulatory view' sees the amygdala as modulating memories stored in other brain regions, not unlike current theories of the hippocampus. This paper believes that the two views are not mutually exclusive, and argues for a synthesized model in which the amygdala is both the site of fear memory encoding and storage and a modulator of memory functions in other structures.

No comments: