Maren Stephen
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043, USA.
Eur J Neurosci. 2008 Oct;28(8):1661-6. doi: 10.1111/j.1460-9568.2008.06485.x.
Pavlovian fear conditioning has become an important model for investigating the neural substrates of learning and memory in rats, mice and humans. The hippocampus and amygdala are widely believed to be essential for fear conditioning to contexts and discrete cues, respectively. Indeed, this parsing of function within the fear circuit has been used to leverage fear conditioning as a behavioral assay of hippocampal and amygdala function, particularly in transgenic mouse models. Recent work, however, blurs the anatomical segregation of cue and context conditioning and challenges the necessity for the hippocampus and amygdala in fear learning. Moreover, nonassociative factors may influence the performance of fear responses under a variety of conditions. Caution must therefore be exercised when using fear conditioning as a behavioral assay for hippocampal- and amygdala-dependent learning.
巴甫洛夫恐惧条件反射已成为研究大鼠、小鼠和人类学习与记忆神经基础的重要模型。人们普遍认为，海马体和杏仁核分别对于情境恐惧条件反射和离散线索恐惧条件反射至关重要。实际上，恐惧回路内的这种功能划分已被用于将恐惧条件反射作为海马体和杏仁核功能的行为检测方法，尤其是在转基因小鼠模型中。然而，最近的研究模糊了线索条件反射和情境条件反射的解剖学区分，并对海马体和杏仁核在恐惧学习中的必要性提出了质疑。此外，非联想因素可能在各种条件下影响恐惧反应的表现。因此，在将恐惧条件反射用作海马体和杏仁核依赖性学习的行为检测方法时必须谨慎。
