The Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Its Role in Controlling Contextual Fear Memory to Predatory Threats

Overview

Journal Elife

Specialty Biology

Date 2022 Jan 5

PMID 34984975

Citations 12

Authors

Miguel Antonio Xavier de Lima

Marcus Vinicius C Baldo

Fernando A Oliveira

Newton Sabino Canteras

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Predator exposure is a life-threatening experience and elicits learned fear responses to the context in which the predator was encountered. The anterior cingulate area (ACA) occupies a pivotal position in a cortical network responsive to predatory threats, and it exerts a critical role in processing fear memory. The experiments were made in mice and revealed that the ACA is involved in both the acquisition and expression of contextual fear to predatory threat. Overall, the ACA can provide predictive relationships between the context and the predator threat and influences fear memory acquisition through projections to the basolateral amygdala and perirhinal region and the expression of contextual fear through projections to the dorsolateral periaqueductal gray. Our results expand previous studies based on classical fear conditioning and open interesting perspectives for understanding how the ACA is involved in processing contextual fear memory to ethologic threatening conditions that entrain specific medial hypothalamic fear circuits.

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