Conditioned turning behavior: a Pavlovian fear response expressed during the post-encounter period following aversive stimulation

Rats were trained to fear an auditory conditioned stimulus (CS) by pairing it with a mild electric shock (the unconditioned stimulus, or US) delivered to one eyelid. After training, the CS elicited two different conditioned fear responses from rats: a passive freezing response, and an active turning response. The balance between these two modes of conditioned responding depended upon the rat's recent history of encounters with the US. If rats had not recently encountered the US, then they responded to the CS by freezing. But after recently encountering the US, rats exhibited CS-evoked turning responses that were always directed away from the trained eyelid, even if the US had recently been delivered to the opposite (untrained) eyelid. This post-encounter turning behavior was not observed in rats that had been trained with unpaired presentations of the CS and US, indicating that even though CS-evoked turning was selectively expressed after recent encounters with the US, it was nonetheless a conditioned Pavlovian fear response that depended upon a learned association between the CS and US. Further supporting this conclusion, pharmacological inactivation experiments showed that expression of both freezing and turning behaviors depended upon lateralized circuits in the amygdala and periaqueductal gray (PAG) that are known to support expression of Pavlovian fear responses. These findings indicate that even though the ability of a CS to elicit Pavlovian fear responses depend upon the long-term history of CS-US pairings, the mode of conditioned responding (freezing versus turning in the present experiments) can be modulated by short-term factors, such as the recent history of US encounters. We discuss neural mechanisms that might mediate such short-term transitions between different modes of defensive responding, and consider how dysregulation of such mechanisms might contribute to clinical anxiety disorders.

Bilateral phosphorylation of ERK in the lateral and centrolateral amygdala during unilateral storage of fear memories

We previously showed that when rats were trained to fear an auditory conditioned stimulus (CS) by pairing it with a mild unilateral shock to the eyelid (the unconditioned stimulus, or US), conditioned freezing depended upon the amygdala contralateral but not ipsilateral from the US. It was proposed that convergent activation of amygdala neurons by the CS and US occurred mainly in the amygdala contralateral from US delivery, causing memories of the CS-US association to be stored primarily by that hemisphere. In the present study, we further tested this interpretation by administering unilateral infusions of U0126 (in 50% dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) vehicle) to block phosphorylation of extracellular signal-responsive kinase (ERK) in the amygdala prior to CS-US pairings. Conditioned freezing was impaired 24 h after training when U0126 was infused contralaterally-but not ipsilaterally-from the US, suggesting that fear memories were consolidated mainly by the contralateral amygdala. However, immunostaining experiments revealed that ERK phosphorylation was elevated in both hemispheres of the amygdale's lateral (LA) and centrolateral (CeL) nuclei after paired (but not unpaired (UNP)) presentations of the CS and US. Thus, fear acquisition induced ERK phosphorylation bilaterally in the amygdala, even though the ipsilateral hemisphere did not appear to participate in conditioned freezing. These findings suggest that associative plasticity may occur in both amygdala hemispheres even when only one hemisphere is involved in freezing behavior. Conditioning-induced ERK phosphorylation was identical in both hemispheres of LA, but was slightly greater in the contralateral than ipsilateral hemisphere of CeL. Hence, asymmetric induction of plasticity in CeL might help to explain why conditioned freezing depends preferentially upon the amygdala contralateral from the US in our fear conditioning paradigm.