Effects of reward timing information on cue associability are mediated by amygdala central nucleus.
- 1 January 2011
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Behavioral Neuroscience
- Vol. 125 (1), 46-53
- https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021951
Abstract
The central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) has been implicated in a range of associative learning phenomena often attributed to changes in attentional processing of events. Experiments using a number of behavioral tasks have shown that rats with lesions of CeA fail to show the enhancements of stimulus associability that are normally induced by the surprising omission of expected events. By contrast, in other tasks, rats with lesions of CeA show normal enhancements of associability when events are presented unexpectedly. In this experiment, we examined the effects of CeA lesions on changes in cue associability in a reward timing task. In sham-lesioned rats, the associability of cues that were followed by stimuli that provided reward timing information was maintained at higher levels than that of cues that were followed by uninformative stimuli. Rats with lesions of CeA failed to show this advantage. These results indicate that the role of CeA in the modulation of associability is not limited to cases of event omission. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).Keywords
Funding Information
- National Institutes of Health (MH53667)
This publication has 26 references indexed in Scilit:
- Temporally limited role of substantia nigra–central amygdala connections in surprise‐induced enhancement of learningEuropean Journal of Neuroscience, 2008
- Dissociation of attention in learning and action: Effects of lesions of the amygdala central nucleus, medial prefrontal cortex, and posterior parietal cortex.Behavioral Neuroscience, 2007
- Disconnection of the amygdala central nucleus and the substantia innominata/nucleus basalis magnocellularis disrupts performance in a sustained attention task.Behavioral Neuroscience, 2007
- Enhanced conditioning produced by surprising increases in reinforcer value are unaffected by lesions of the amygdala central nucleusNeurobiology of Learning and Memory, 2006
- Role of Amygdalo-Nigral Circuitry in Conditioning of a Visual Stimulus Paired with FoodJournal of Neuroscience, 2005
- The influence of associability changes in negative patterning and other discriminations.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 2000
- Disconnection of the amygdala central nucleus and substantia innominata/nucleus basalis disrupts increments in conditioned stimulus processing in rats.Behavioral Neuroscience, 1999
- Amygdala central nucleus lesions disrupt increments, but not decrements, in conditioned stimulus processing.Behavioral Neuroscience, 1993
- The orienting response as an index of stimulus associability in rats.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 1988
- A model for Pavlovian learning: Variations in the effectiveness of conditioned but not of unconditioned stimuli.Psychological Review, 1980