The ventral tegmental area (VTA) and substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) may provide modulatory signals that, respectively, influence hippocampal (HPC)- and striatal-dependent memory. Electrophysiological studies investigating neural correlates of learning and memory of dopamine (DA) neurons during classical conditioning tasks have found DA…

Two-way active avoidance (2WAA) involves learning Pavlovian (association of a sound cue with a foot shock) and instrumental (shock avoidance) contingencies. To identify regions where dopamine (DA) is involved in mediating 2WAA, we restored DA signaling in specific brain areas of dopamine-deficient (DD) mice by local reactivation of conditionally…

Pavlovian fear conditioning is not a unitary process. At the neurobiological level multiple brain regions and neurotransmitters contribute to fear learning. At the behavioral level many variables contribute to fear learning including the physical salience of the events being learned about, the direction and magnitude of predictive error, and the…

The effects of prenatal choline availability on Pavlovian conditioning were assessed in adult male rats (3-4 mo). Neither supplementation nor deprivation of prenatal choline affected the acquisition and extinction of simple Pavlovian conditioned excitation, or the acquisition and retardation of conditioned inhibition. However, prenatal choline…

By integrating previous computational models of corticohippocampal function, the authors develop and test a unified theory of the neural substrates of familiarity, recollection, and classical conditioning. This approach integrates models from 2 traditions of hippocampal modeling, those of episodic memory and incremental learning, by drawing on an…

Benzodiazepines have been useful tools for investigating mechanisms underlying learning and memory. The present set of experiments investigates the role of hippocampal GABA[subscript A]/benzodiazepine receptors in memory consolidation using Pavlovian fear conditioning. Rats were prepared with cannulae aimed at the dorsal hippocampus and trained…

Aversive conditioning is an ideal model for studying cholinergic effects on the processes of learning and memory for several reasons. First, deficits produced by selective lesions of the anatomical structures shown to be critical for Pavlovian fear conditioning and inhibitory avoidance (such as the amygdala and hippocampus) resemble those deficits…

How the nervous system encodes learning and memory processes has interested researchers for 100 years. Over this span of time, a number of basic neuroscience methods has been developed to explore the relationship between learning and the brain, including brain lesion, stimulation, pharmacology, anatomy, imaging, and recording techniques. In this…