Premium
CA3 NMDA receptors are required for the rapid formation of a salient contextual representation
Author(s) -
McHugh Thomas J.,
Tonegawa Susumu
Publication year - 2009
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.20684
Subject(s) - neuroscience , psychology , classical conditioning , unconditioned stimulus , salience (neuroscience) , associative learning , fear conditioning , nmda receptor , conditioning , stimulus (psychology) , cognitive psychology , amygdala , receptor , chemistry , biochemistry , statistics , mathematics
The acquisition of Pavlovian fear learning engages the hippocampus when the conditioned stimuli are multimodal or temporally isolated from the unconditioned stimuli. By subjecting CA3‐NR1 KO mice to conditioning protocols that incorporate time‐dependent components, we found that the loss of plasticity at recurrent CA3 synapses resulted in a deficits in contextual conditioning specifically when the exposure to the context was brief or when the unconditioned stimulus was signaled with a competing, predictive unimodal stimulus. Our results suggest CA3 contributes both speed and salience to contextual processing and support the theory of competition between multimodal and unimodal conditioned stimuli for associative learning. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.