"Contributions of the perirhinal cortex and hippocampus to Olfactory, auditory, and contextual fear conditioning"
A remarkable degree of progress in identifying and characterizing the ways in which the brain forms and stores memories, particularly memories of emotionally significant events, has arisen from the study of Pavlovian conditioning in rats. Accumulating data indicate that two brain areas, the rhinal cortices and the hippocampus, may participate critically in the acquisition and maintenance of emotional memories. In an attempt to reconcile several extant controversies regarding the ways in which these brain areas contribute to emotional learning, the proposed studies will take advantage of several well-characterized Pavlovian conditioning paradigms to explore the effects of discrete pretraining lesions of these areas on the acquisition and maintenance of the associations between olfactory or auditory stimuli and mildly aversive events. The brain areas under investigation in this project are among the most severely damaged in humans suffering from Alzheimer's disease. These areas also appear to play a particularly prominent role in a variety of different types of learning in both human and nonhuman mammalian species. Together the results of these studies will provide answers to fundamental questions regarding the contributions of rhinal cortex and hippocampus to emotional learning and memory specifically and to the ways in which these brain areas contribute to learning and memory processes in general.
