Fear Circuits in the Amygdala: Serial or Parallel Processing?

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All organisms use environmental stimuli to guide their behavior in adaptive ways. One important class of adaptive behaviors involves responding to threats, stimuli that cause or predict harm. The overall goal of this project is to address some fundamental issues about the neural circuitry through which learned stimuli trigger responses to dangerous or threatening stimuli. To study this these investigators will use behavioral, physiological and anatomical approaches to understand how neutral stimulus that has acquired threat-arousing properties is processed in the amygdala, which is known to be crucially involved in responding to threats. A major controversy has been whether a fearful (threat-arousing) stimulus must enter the amygdala via the lateral nucleus, as much research has suggested, or whether it may also enter the amygdala via the central nucleus. These are called the serial and parallel models of the amygdala, respectively. The studies proposed will test which model is most viable. This project predicts that the serial model is correct. This work will expand our understanding of how organisms adapt to dangerous environmental conditions and the results will also further our understanding of the circuits underlying the learning and memory storage of emotional information. The project will offer the opportunity for training postdoctoral, doctoral, and undergraduate students in basic approaches to the neuroscience of emotion, learning, and memory.