functional imaging of stimulus convergence in amygdalar neurons during pavlovian fear conditioning功能成像在amygdalar神经元刺激收敛巴甫洛夫恐惧条件反射.pdfVIP

Functional Imaging of Stimulus Convergence in Amygdalar Neurons during Pavlovian Fear Conditioning 1,2 2 1,2 1,2 Sabiha K. Barot , Ain Chung , Jeansok J. Kim , Ilene L. Bernstein * 1 Program in Neurobiology Behavior, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America, 2 Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America Abstract Background: Associative conditioning is a ubiquitous form of learning throughout the animal kingdom and fear conditioning is one of the most widely researched models for studying its neurobiological basis. Fear conditioning is also considered a model system for understanding phobias and anxiety disorders. A fundamental issue in fear conditioning regards the existence and location of neurons in the brain that receive convergent information about the conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US) during the acquisition of conditioned fear memory. Convergent activation of neurons is generally viewed as a key event for fear learning, yet there has been almost no direct evidence of this critical event in the mammalian brain. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here, we used A rc cellular compartmental analysis of temporal gene transcription by fluorescence in situ hybridization (catFISH) to identify neurons activated during single trial contextual fear conditioning in rats. To conform to temporal requirements of catFISH analysis we used a novel delayed contextual fear conditioning protocol which yields significant single- trial fear conditioning with temporal parameters amenable to catFISH analysis. Analysis yielded clear evidence that a