The amygdaloid complex has been implicated in a variety of brain disorders, including epilepsy, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, and dementia. Further particular regions of the amygdaloid complex are critical to the expression of some forms of associative learning and may participate in the development of drug addiction. The goal of the proposed project is to examine the development of learning-related neural plasticity in periamygdaloid cortex (PAC), an amygdalocortical area that establishes reciprocal connections with the main olfactory bulb and amygdaloid areas implicated in learning. Sensory coding mechanisms will be examined by conducting receptive field analyses focusing on the temporal characteristics of spike trains elicited in individual PAC neurons. In addition, alterations in olfactory tuning will be examined following discriminative olfactory fear conditioning. These findings will contribute to an understanding of temporal coding in the central nervous system and the contribution of plasticity in sensory cortical areas to amygdala-dependent associative learning.
