Integration of sensory and fear memories in the rat medial temporal lobe.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 40106328.
- Also identified by DOI 10.7554/eLife.101965 and PMC identifier 11922503.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Wong et al., 2019 used a sensory preconditioning protocol to examine how sensory and fear memories are integrated in the rat medial temporal lobe. In this protocol, rats integrate a sound-light (sensory) memory that forms in stage 1 with a light-shock (fear) memory that forms in stage 2 to generate fear responses (freezing) across test presentations of the sound in stage 3. Here, we advance this research by showing that (1) how/when rats integrate the sound-light and light-shock memories (online in stage 2 or at test in stage 3) changes with the number of sound-light pairings in stage 1; and (2) regardless of how/when it occurs, the integration requires communication between two regions of the medial temporal lobe: the perirhinal cortex and basolateral amygdala complex. Thus, 'event familiarity' determines how/when sensory and fear memories are integrated but not the circuitry by which the integration occurs: this remains the same.
Medical subject headings
- Fear
- Temporal Lobe
- Memory