Discriminative fear conditioning requires learning to dissociate between safety cues and cues that predict negative outcomes yet little is known about what processes contribute to discriminative fear learning. According to attentional models of time perception, processes that distract from timing result in temporal underestimation. If discriminative fear learning only requires learning what cue...

Appetitive conditioning refers to the process of learning cue-reward associations and is mediated by the mesocorticolimbic system. Appetitive conditioned responses are difficult to extinguish, especially for highly salient reward such as food and drugs. We investigate whether aversive counterconditioning can alter reward reinstatement in the ventral striatum in healthy volunteers using function...

Taste memory depends on motivational and post-ingestional consequences; thus, it can be aversive (e.g., conditioned taste aversion, CTA) if a novel, palatable taste is paired with visceral malaise, or it can be appetitive if no intoxication appears after novel taste consumption, and a taste preference is developed.The nucleus accumbens (NAc) plays a role in hedonic reactivity to taste stimuli, ...

The contribution of oscillatory synchrony in the primate amygdala-prefrontal pathway to aversive learning remains largely unknown. We found increased power and phase synchrony in the theta range during aversive conditioning. The synchrony was linked to single-unit spiking and exhibited specific directionality between input and output measures in each region. Although it was correlated with the ...

Rorick-Kehn and Steinmetz (2005) report that neurons in the central and basolateral nuclei of the amygdala exhibit learning-related spike firing to conditional stimuli associated with shock in 3 different aversive conditioning paradigms: eyeblink conditioning, fear conditioning, and signaled avoidance conditioning. Central nucleus neurons responded in all 3 tasks, whereas basolateral nucleus ne...

The highlight for February is from Chris Cunningham of the Department of Behavioral Neuroscience at the Oregon Health & Science University. In Dr. Cunningham’s highlight, he describes his initial introduction to the general field of taste aversion learning and the specific direction he has taken over the past 30 years. As he describes, the majority of his work on aversion learning has focused o...

A growing body of literature suggests that structures along the midline of the prefrontal cortex (mPFC), including Brodmann's area 32 (prelimbic cortex) and area 24 (anterior cingulate cortex) in the rabbit play a role in retrieval of learned information. The present studies compared the effects of post-training lesions produced either immediately or 1-week following learning, to either prelimb...

The goal of this study was to investigate the function of the ventral striatum and brain regions involved in anxiety and learning during aversive contextual conditioning. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to assess the hemodynamic brain response of 118 healthy volunteers during a differential fear conditioning paradigm. Concurrently obtained skin conductance responses and self-repo...

Pavlovian predictions of future aversive outcomes lead to behavioral inhibition, suppression, and withdrawal. There is considerable evidence for the involvement of serotonin in both the learning of these predictions and the inhibitory consequences that ensue, although less for a causal relationship between the two. In the context of a highly simplified model of chains of affectively charged tho...