This is being pursued through studies of multichannel single unit recordings in awake behaving animals, intracellular recordings in anesthetized animals, and whole cell recordings in brain slices. Conceptual issues being explored include the following. Functional inactivation of the lateral and basal nuclei of the amygdala by muscimol infusion prevents fear conditioning to an explicit CS and to contextual stimuli. NMDA and AMPA receptors are post-synaptic to auditory thalamic afferents. Fear conditioning enhances different temporal components of tone-evoked spike trains in auditory cortex and lateral amygdala.
Fear conditioning induces associative long-term potentiation in the amygdala.
A mixed-trial fMRI study. Pitkanen, A., V. Savander, et al. The Emotional Brain . New York, Simon and Schuster. All rights reserved.