Univ of the Virgin Islands
Mentor
Ryan LaLumiere, Psychology
Project title
Posttraining optogenetic modulation of basolateral amygdala projections to the ventral hippocampus influence the consolidation of emotional but not special learning for contextual fear conditioning
Abstract
The basolateral amygdala modulates memory consolidation for multiple types of learning including contextual fear conditioning (CFC). One of the BLA’s downstream targets, the ventral hippocampus (vHPC), has previously been shown to process emotion-related aspects of learning but whether the BLAàvHPC pathway modulates memory consolidation is unknown. The current study used a modified CFC task, which allows separation of the context and footshock learning, followed by immediate optogenetic modulation of activity in the BLAàvHPC pathway.