Electrical Stimulation of Medial Prefrontal Cortex Reduces Conditioned Fear in a Temporally Specific Manner.
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- 1 April 2004
- journal article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Behavioral Neuroscience
- Vol. 118 (2), 389-394
- https://doi.org/10.1037/0735-7044.118.2.389
Abstract
The authors recently showed that extinction of auditory fear conditioning leads to potentiation of tone-evoked activity of neurons in the infralimbic (IL) subregion of the medial prefrontal cortex, suggesting that IL inhibits fear after extinction (M. R. Milad, & G. J. Quirk, 2002). In support of this finding, pairing conditioned tones with brief (300-ms) electrical stimulation of IL reduces conditioned freezing. The present study showed that IL stimulation inhibits freezing if given 0.1 s after tone onset (the latency of tone-evoked responses) but has no effect if given either 1 s before or 1 s after tone onset. This suggests that IL gates the response of downstream structures such as the amygdala to fear stimuli.Keywords
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