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Amygdala, Long-term Potentiation, and Fear Conditioning

Institute of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

Vadim Y. Bolshakov

McLean Hospital, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Belmont, MA, vadimb{at}mclean.harvard.edu

Fear conditioning, during which emotional significance is attached to an initially biologically insignificant conditioned stimulus, when such neutral stimulus is paired with an aversive unconditioned stimulus, provides an experimental paradigm that is most commonly used to study fear learning. The amygdala, a sub-cortical nuclear group, is a brain structure critically important for fear conditioning. Recent studies indicate that both fear conditioning-induced neuronal plasticity and LTP at the amygdala synapses share common mechanisms of induction and expression. These findings provide the most direct evidence yet available that the mechanisms of LTP are recruited in the experimental animals during behavioral training and that such mechanisms might be utilized for memory storage.

Key Words: Amygdala • Long-term potentiation (LTP) • Fear conditioning • Learning • Memory

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