PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Aldis P. Weible
AU  - Christine Liu
AU  - Cristopher M. Niell
AU  - Michael Wehr
TI  - Auditory Cortex Is Required for Fear Potentiation of Gap Detection
AID  - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3408-14.2014
DP  - 2014 Nov 12
TA  - The Journal of Neuroscience
PG  - 15437--15445
VI  - 34
IP  - 46
4099  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/46/15437.short
4100  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/46/15437.full
SO  - J. Neurosci.2014 Nov 12; 34
AB  - Auditory cortex is necessary for the perceptual detection of brief gaps in noise, but is not necessary for many other auditory tasks such as frequency discrimination, prepulse inhibition of startle responses, or fear conditioning with pure tones. It remains unclear why auditory cortex should be necessary for some auditory tasks but not others. One possibility is that auditory cortex is causally involved in gap detection and other forms of temporal processing in order to associate meaning with temporally structured sounds. This predicts that auditory cortex should be necessary for associating meaning with gaps. To test this prediction, we developed a fear conditioning paradigm for mice based on gap detection. We found that pairing a 10 or 100 ms gap with an aversive stimulus caused a robust enhancement of gap detection measured 6 h later, which we refer to as fear potentiation of gap detection. Optogenetic suppression of auditory cortex during pairing abolished this fear potentiation, indicating that auditory cortex is critically involved in associating temporally structured sounds with emotionally salient events.