Contributions of the Perirhinal Cortex and Hippocampus to Olfactory, Auditory, and Contextual Fear Conditioning

名称：Timothy Otto标题：“嗅周皮层和海马体对嗅觉、听觉和情境恐惧条件反射的贡献”在识别和描述大脑形成和储存记忆的方式，特别是情感重大事件的记忆方面，在对大鼠巴甫洛夫条件反射的研究中取得了显著的进展。越来越多的数据表明，大脑的两个区域，即鼻皮质和海马体，可能在情绪记忆的获取和维持中起着至关重要的作用。为了调和目前关于这些大脑区域对情绪学习的贡献方式的几个争议，本研究将利用几个特征良好的巴甫洛夫条件反射范式来探索这些区域的离散预训练损伤对嗅觉或听觉刺激与轻度厌恶事件之间关联的获取和维持的影响。该项目所研究的大脑区域是阿尔茨海默病患者中受损最严重的区域之一。这些区域似乎在人类和非人类哺乳动物的各种不同类型的学习中发挥着特别突出的作用。综上所述，这些研究的结果将为有关鼻皮质和海马体对情绪学习和记忆的具体贡献以及这些大脑区域对学习和记忆过程的一般贡献的基本问题提供答案。

Lay AbstractIBN 9817145PI Name: Timothy Otto Title: "Contributions of the perirhinal cortex and hippocampus to Olfactory, auditory, and contextual fear conditioning" A remarkable degree of progress in identifying and characterizing the ways in which the brain forms and stores memories, particularly memories of emotionally significant events, has arisen from the study of Pavlovian conditioning in rats. Accumulating data indicate that two brain areas, the rhinal cortices and the hippocampus, may participate critically in the acquisition and maintenance of emotional memories. In an attempt to reconcile several extant controversies regarding the ways in which these brain areas contribute to emotional learning, the proposed studies will take advantage of several well-characterized Pavlovian conditioning paradigms to explore the effects of discrete pretraining lesions of these areas on the acquisition and maintenance of the associations between olfactory or auditory stimuli and mildly aversive events. The brain areas under investigation in this project are among the most severely damaged in humans suffering from Alzheimer's disease. These areas also appear to play a particularly prominent role in a variety of different types of learning in both human and nonhuman mammalian species. Together the results of these studies will provide answers to fundamental questions regarding the contributions of rhinal cortex and hippocampus to emotional learning and memory specifically and to the ways in which these brain areas contribute to learning and memory processes in general.