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The Journal of Neuroscience, August 9, 2006, 26(32):8305-8309; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1647-06.2006

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Lesions of the Basolateral Amygdala Disrupt Conditioning Based on the Retrieved Representations of Motivationally Significant Events

Dominic M. Dwyer and Simon Killcross

School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3YG, United Kingdom

Correspondence should be addressed to Dominic M. Dwyer, School of Psychology, Tower Building, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3YG, UK. Email: DwyerDM{at}cardiff.ac.uk

One recent perspective (Blundell et al., 2001; 2003; Killcross and Blundell, 2002; Balleine et al. 2003) on the function of the basolateral region of the amygdala (BLA) suggests that it plays an important role in the representation of the sensory features of motivationally significant events. This predicts that lesions of the BLA will not produce a decrement in performance in conditioning procedures based on the formation of associations between the sensory aspects of neutral events but will interfere with conditioning based on associations between neutral cues and motivationally significant events. This prediction is supported by the evidence that BLA lesions were without effect on a sensory preconditioning procedure (experiment 1A) that used neutral cues but that BLA lesions did significantly impair representation-mediated conditioning (experiment 1B) when the target cues were motivationally significant at the time of training. These results demonstrate that animals with lesions of the BLA can represent the sensory aspects of neutral events but not the sensory aspects of motivationally significant events.

Key words: association; basolateral amygdala; mediated conditioning; classical conditioning; motivation; sensory preconditioning

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Received April 18, 2006; revised July 5, 2006; accepted July 8, 2006.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dominic M. Dwyer, School of Psychology, Tower Building, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3YG, UK. Email: DwyerDM{at}cardiff.ac.uk

This article has been cited by other articles:

				A. Mohanty, D. R. Gitelman, D. M. Small, and M. M. Mesulam The Spatial Attention Network Interacts with Limbic and Monoaminergic Systems to Modulate Motivation-Induced Attention Shifts Cereb Cortex, February 27, 2008; (2008) bhn021v1. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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