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Effects of pre or posttraining dorsal hippocampus D‐AP5 injection on fear conditioning to tone, background, and foreground context
Author(s) -
Schenberg Eduardo Ekman,
Oliveira Maria Gabriela Menezes
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
hippocampus
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.767
H-Index - 155
eISSN - 1098-1063
pISSN - 1050-9631
DOI - 10.1002/hipo.20475
Subject(s) - fear conditioning , psychology , neuroscience , nmda receptor , conditioning , context (archaeology) , dorsum , hippocampus , hippocampal formation , classical conditioning , antagonist , tone (literature) , memory consolidation , amygdala , receptor , medicine , anatomy , paleontology , art , statistics , mathematics , literature , biology
NMDA receptor antagonist D‐AP5 was injected into the dorsal hippocampus of Wistar rats before or immediately after the training session in fear conditioning. Training was conducted both with signaled (background context) or unsignaled (foreground context) footshocks. Contextual fear conditioning was assessed 24 h later and tone fear conditioning 48 h after training (only in the signaled footshock condition). Pretraining injections impaired conditioned fear to contextual features, both in background and foreground configurations, whereas tone fear conditioning was left intact. Posttraining injections were ineffective in all cases. We conclude that dorsal hippocampal NMDA receptors are required for contextual fear acquisition independently of context saliency and that they are not required to early consolidation processes. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.