Kong Mi-Seon, Ancell Ethan, Witten Daniela M, Zweifel Larry S
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, United States.
Department of Statistics, University of Washington, Seattle, United States.
Elife. 2025 Jan 10;13:RP101980. doi: 10.7554/eLife.101980.
The central amygdala (CeA) has emerged as an important brain region for regulating both negative (fear and anxiety) and positive (reward) affective behaviors. The CeA has been proposed to encode affective information in the form of valence (whether the stimulus is good or bad) or salience (how significant is the stimulus), but the extent to which these two types of stimulus representation occur in the CeA is not known. Here, we used single cell calcium imaging in mice during appetitive and aversive conditioning and found that majority of CeA neurons (65%) encode the valence of the unconditioned stimulus (US) with a smaller subset of cells (15%) encoding the salience of the US. Valence and salience encoding of the conditioned stimulus (CS) was also observed, albeit to a lesser extent. These findings show that the CeA is a site of convergence for encoding oppositely valenced US information.
中央杏仁核（CeA）已成为调节负面（恐惧和焦虑）和正面（奖赏）情感行为的重要脑区。有人提出，CeA以效价（刺激是好是坏）或显著性（刺激有多重要）的形式编码情感信息，但这两种类型的刺激表征在CeA中出现的程度尚不清楚。在这里，我们在小鼠进行食欲性和厌恶性条件反射期间使用单细胞钙成像，发现大多数CeA神经元（约65%）编码非条件刺激（US）的效价，一小部分细胞（约15%）编码US的显著性。条件刺激（CS）的效价和显著性编码也有观察到，尽管程度较小。这些发现表明，CeA是编码具有相反效价的US信息的汇聚位点。
