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Pavlovian fear conditioning activates a common pattern of neurons in the lateral amygdala of individual brains

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posted on 2023-05-21, 00:27 authored by Bergstrom, HC, McDonald, CG, Otto JohnsonOtto Johnson
Understanding the physical encoding of a memory (the engram) is a fundamental question in neuroscience. Although it has been established that the lateral amygdala is a key site for encoding associative fear memory, it is currently unclear whether the spatial distribution of neurons encoding a given memory is random or stable. Here we used spatial principal components analysis to quantify the topography of activated neurons, in a select region of the lateral amygdala, from rat brains encoding a Pavlovian conditioned fear memory. Our results demonstrate a stable, spatially patterned organization of amygdala neurons are activated during the formation of a Pavlovian conditioned fear memory. We suggest that this stable neuronal assembly constitutes a spatial dimension of the engram.

History

Publication title

PloS One

Volume

6

Article number

15698

Number

15698

Pagination

1-8

ISSN

1932-6203

Department/School

School of Psychological Sciences

Publisher

Public Library of Science

Place of publication

United States

Rights statement

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Mental health

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