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The Journal of Neuroscience, June 14, 2006, 26(24):6603-6609; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1056-06.2006

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Dorsal Hippocampal Contributions to Unimodal Contextual Conditioning

Tim Otto and Patrick Poon

Program in Behavioral Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08854

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Tim Otto, Program in Behavioral Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, 152 Frelinghuysen Road, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854. Email: totto{at}rci.rutgers.edu

Although there is general consensus that the hippocampus is not critically involved in the acquisition of fear conditioned to an explicit conditioned stimulus (CS), the extent to which the hippocampus participates in contextual fear conditioning remains unclear. To further characterize the potential role of the hippocampus in contextual fear conditioning, the present experiments examined the effect of excitotoxic lesions of dorsal hippocampus on the acquisition of a novel contextual fear conditioning paradigm in which a unimodal (olfactory) cue served to disambiguate discrete "contexts" within a single behavioral training chamber. Selective lesions of dorsal hippocampus severely attenuated olfactory contextual conditioning without affecting conditioning to an explicit auditory or olfactory CS. Additional experiments indicate that these contextual conditioning deficits cannot be attributed to a lesion-induced decrement in olfactory perception, a preferential impairment of "weak" forms of conditioning, or hyperactivity. Thus, the hippocampus appears to contribute importantly to the acquisition of fear conditioned to explicitly nonspatial, unimodal, temporally, and spatially diffuse contextual stimuli.

Key words: dorsal hippocampus; contextual conditioning; olfactory learning; associative learning; context; rat

Received Feb. 9, 2006; revised May 5, 2006; accepted May 16, 2006.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Tim Otto, Program in Behavioral Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, 152 Frelinghuysen Road, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854. Email: totto{at}rci.rutgers.edu




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A. Marschner, R. Kalisch, B. Vervliet, D. Vansteenwegen, and C. Buchel
Dissociable Roles for the Hippocampus and the Amygdala in Human Cued versus Context Fear Conditioning
J. Neurosci., September 3, 2008; 28(36): 9030 - 9036.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


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