Emotions play a tremendous role in our lives - creating priorities, shaping values, and guiding our most important choices. Recent studies demonstrate that learning and memory in humans is much more profoundly affected by emotion than was previously assumed. The long-term goal is to understand how the amygdala and related brain regions are involved in emotional learning and memory. This requires elucidating the necessary and modulatory structures involved in emotional learning. The model preparation for studying aversive Pavlovian learning entails conditioned enhancement of the rat eyeblink reflex. The short-latency (R1) electromyographic component of the blink reflex offers several advantages as an index of emotional learning. The proposed methods combine neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, behavior and computational modeling. A general working hypothesis has been developed, an associated computational model, and a behavioral paradigm for evaluating the role of the amygdala and perirhinal cortex in forming associations between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an unconditioned stimulus (US) and for encoding the CS-US interval during aversive conditioning. The computational model is the first to show how certain temporal aspects of associative learning emerge from the cellular neurobiology and circuitry. The approach allows vertical integration, traversing several levels of organization - from synapses to circuits to behavior. The model serves as the current hypothesis and also as the theoretical glue that binds information within and among levels and helps us understand and test various proposed hypotheses. In pursuit of the goal of vertical integration, the system selected for study enables one to go back and forth between in vitro and in vivo analysis, and the technology to do so is available (although the present proposal is concerned with in vivo studies). One goal is to demystify some of the psychological components of certain disorders by understanding the circuitry involved in emotional learning and to develop testable hypothesis for explaining biological changes that occur during stressful situations. The information and technology should be relevant to insights into, and treatment of, both psychiatric and neurological disorders (anxiety, stress, panic, cognitive impairment, blepharospasm, and epilepsy). By design, the approach is extendible into aging-related problems.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01MH058405-03
Application #
6165228
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZMH1-NRB-Q (01))
Project Start
1998-05-01
Project End
2003-02-28
Budget Start
2000-03-01
Budget End
2001-02-28
Support Year
3
Fiscal Year
2000
Total Cost
$271,747
Indirect Cost
Name
Yale University
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
082359691
City
New Haven
State
CT
Country
United States
Zip Code
06520
Baysinger, Amber N; Kent, Brianne A; Brown, Thomas H (2012) Muscarinic receptors in amygdala control trace fear conditioning. PLoS One 7:e45720
Parsana, Ashwini J; Moran, Elizabeth E; Brown, Thomas H (2012) Rats learn to freeze to 22-kHz ultrasonic vocalizations through autoconditioning. Behav Brain Res 232:395-9
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Kent, Brianne A; Brown, Thomas H (2012) Dual functions of perirhinal cortex in fear conditioning. Hippocampus 22:2068-79
Parsana, Ashwini J; Li, Nanxin; Brown, Thomas H (2012) Positive and negative ultrasonic social signals elicit opposing firing patterns in rat amygdala. Behav Brain Res 226:77-86
Moyer Jr, James R; Furtak, Sharon C; McGann, John P et al. (2011) Aging-related changes in calcium-binding proteins in rat perirhinal cortex. Neurobiol Aging 32:1693-706
Bang, Sun Jung; Brown, Thomas H (2009) Perirhinal cortex supports acquired fear of auditory objects. Neurobiol Learn Mem 92:53-62
Bang, Sun Jung; Brown, Thomas H (2009) Muscarinic receptors in perirhinal cortex control trace conditioning. J Neurosci 29:4346-50
Bang, Sun Jung; Allen, Timothy A; Jones, Lauren K et al. (2008) Asymmetrical stimulus generalization following differential fear conditioning. Neurobiol Learn Mem 90:200-16

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