The role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex in the recovery of extinguished fear.
TLDR
The effects of electrolytic vmPFC lesions made before training on the acquisition, extinction, and recovery of conditioned fear responses in a 2 d experiment suggest a role of thevmPFC in consolidation of extinction learning or the recall of contexts in which extinction took place.Abstract:
Conditioned fear responses to a tone paired with footshock extinguish when the tone is presented repeatedly in the absence of shock. Rather than erase the tone–shock association, extinction is thought to involve new learning accompanied by inhibition of conditioned responding. Despite much interest in extinction from a clinical perspective, little is known about the neural circuits that are involved. Although the prefrontal cortex has a well established role in the inhibition of inappropriate behaviors, previous reports have disagreed as to the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in extinction. We have reexamined the effects of electrolytic vmPFC lesions made before training on the acquisition, extinction, and recovery of conditioned fear responses in a 2 d experiment. On Day 1 vmPFC lesions had no effect on acquisition or extinction of conditioned freezing and suppression of bar pressing. On Day 2 sham rats recovered only 27% of their acquired freezing, whereas vmPFC-lesioned rats recovered 86%, which was indistinguishable from a control group that never received extinction. The high recovery in lesioned rats could not be attributed to decreased motivation or altered sensitivity to footshock. vmPFC lesions that spared the caudal infralimbic (IL) nucleus had no effect. Thus, the vmPFC (particularly the IL nucleus) is not necessary for expression of extinction, but it is necessary for the recall of extinction learning after a long delay. These data suggest a role of the vmPFC in consolidation of extinction learning or the recall of contexts in which extinction took place.read more
Citations
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References
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Book
The Rat Brain in Stereotaxic Coordinates
George Paxinos,Charles Watson +1 more
TL;DR: This paper presents a meta-analyses of the determinants of earthquake-triggered landsliding in the Czech Republic over a period of 18 months in order to establish a probabilistic framework for estimating the intensity of the earthquake.
Journal ArticleDOI
Emotion Circuits in the Brain
TL;DR: The field of neuroscience has, after a long period of looking the other way, again embraced emotion as an important research area, and much of the progress has come from studies of fear, and especially fear conditioning as mentioned in this paper.
Book
The prefrontal cortex
TL;DR: The Prefrontal Cortex, Fifth Edition, provides users with a thoroughly updated version of this comprehensive work that has historically served as the classic reference on this part of the brain.
Journal ArticleDOI
Different Contributions of the Human Amygdala and Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex to Decision-Making
TL;DR: The results suggest that amygdala damage is associated with impairment in decision-making and that the roles played by the amygdala and VMF in decision -making are different.
Journal ArticleDOI
Topographical organization of the efferent projections of the medial prefrontal cortex in the rat: An anterograde tract-tracing study with Phaseolus vulgaris leucoagglutinin
TL;DR: The purpose of the present investigation was to examine the topographical organization of efferent projections from the cytoarchitectonic divisions of the mPFC (the medial precentral, dorsal anterior cingulate and prelimbic cortices) to determine whether the efferents from different regions within the prelimbics were organized topographically.