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

Citation

Bergstrom, HC and McDonald, CG and Johnson, LR, Pavlovian fear conditioning activates a common pattern of neurons in the lateral amygdala of individual brains, PloS One, 6, (1) Article 15698. ISSN 1932-6203 (2011) [Refereed Article]


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

DOI: doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0015698

Abstract

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.

Item Details

Item Type:Refereed Article
Keywords:memory, PTSD, Amygdala
Research Division:Biomedical and Clinical Sciences
Research Group:Neurosciences
Research Field:Cellular nervous system
Objective Division:Health
Objective Group:Public health (excl. specific population health)
Objective Field:Mental health
UTAS Author:Johnson, LR (Associate Professor Luke Johnson)
ID Code:145131
Year Published:2011
Web of Science® Times Cited:25
Deposited By:Psychology
Deposited On:2021-07-02
Last Modified:2022-12-06
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