Conditioned fear memories that are context-specific shortly after conditioning generalize over time. We exposed rats to a context reminder 30 d after conditioning, which served to reinstate context-specificity, and investigated how this reminder alters retrieval-induced activity in the hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex (aCC) relative to a…

Long-lasting memories of adverse experiences are essential for individuals' survival but are also involved, in the form of recurrent recollections of the traumatic experience, in the aetiology of anxiety diseases (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD]). Extinction-based erasure of fear memories has long been pursued as a behavioral way to…

We report that post-training inactivation of basolateral amygdala region (BLA) with muscimol impaired memory for contextual-fear conditioning (as measured by freezing) and intra-BLA norepinephrine enhanced this memory. However, pre-exposure to the context eliminated both of these effects. These findings provide a likely explanation of why an…