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The Journal of Neuroscience, November 30, 2005, 25(48):11117-11124; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2032-05.2005

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Fear Conditioning following Unilateral Temporal Lobectomy: Dissociation of Conditioned Startle Potentiation and Autonomic Learning

Almut I. Weike,¹ Alfons O. Hamm,¹ Harald T. Schupp,⁴ Uwe Runge,² Henry W. S. Schroeder,³ and Christof Kessler²

Departments of ¹Psychology, ²Neurology, and ³Neurosurgery, University of Greifswald, 17487 Greifswald, Germany, and ⁴Department of Psychology, University of Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz, Germany

The present study investigated fear-potentiated startle and autonomic learning in brain-lesioned patients in a classical fear-conditioning paradigm. Startle blink and skin conductance responses of 30 patients who underwent unilateral temporal lobectomy because of drug-resistant epilepsy were compared with those of 32 healthy controls. As expected, temporal lobectomy patients showed a general impairment in fear conditioning relative to controls. This impairment did not differ with respect to the affected hemisphere. Moreover, while fear-conditioned startle potentiation in healthy controls was independent of contingency awareness, skin conductance discrimination was only observed for those participants who correctly recognized the stimulus contingencies. Patients who acquired a declarative memory of the contingencies also showed intact skin conductance discrimination but failed to exhibit fear-potentiated startle. The present findings support a two-levels-of-learning account of human fear conditioning and also demonstrate that the amygdala is crucially involved in fear learning.

Key words: amygdala; hippocampus; startle; skin conductance; fear conditioning; emotion

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Received May 20, 2005; revised October 10, 2005; accepted October 16, 2005.

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