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Barrientos RM, O'Reilly RC, Rudy JW.
Memory for context is
impaired by injecting anisomycin into dorsal hippocampus following context
exploration.
Behav Brain Res. 2002 Aug 21;134(1-2):299-306.
Department of Psychology and The Center for Neuroscience, University of
Colorado, CB345, Boulder, CO 80309, USA. rbarr@psych.colorado.edu
Pre-exposure to the context facilitates the small amount of contextual
fear conditioning that is normally produced by immediate shock. This context
pre-exposure facilitation effect provides a convenient way to study the
rat's learning about context. We recently reported that anterograde damage
to dorsal hippocampus prevents this facilitation. The present experiments
strengthen this conclusion by showing that the protein synthesis inhibitor,
anisomycin, injected bilaterally into the dorsal hippocampus following
context pre-exposure also significantly reduces the facilitation effect. The
same treatment given immediately after immediate shock, however, had no
effect on facilitation. These results support theories that assume that, (a)
contextual fear involves two processes, acquiring and storing a conjunctive
representation of a context and associating that representation with fear;
and (b) the hippocampus contributes to contextual fear by participating in
the storage of the memory representation of the context. Copyright 2002
Elsevier Science B.V.
PMID: 12191817
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