Activation of D1/5 Dopamine Receptors: A Common Mechanism for Enhancing Extinction of Fear and Reward-Seeking Behaviors.

ABSTRACT: Dopamine is critical for many processes that drive learning and memory, including motivation, prediction error, incentive salience, memory consolidation, and response output. Theories of dopamine's function in these processes have, for the most part, been developed from behavioral approaches that examine learning mechanisms in appetitive tasks. A parallel and growing literature indicates that dopamine signaling is involved in consolidation of memories into stable representations in aversive tasks such as fear conditioning. Relatively little is known about how dopamine may modulate memories that form during extinction, when organisms learn that the relation between previously associated events is severed. We investigated whether fear and reward extinction share common mechanisms that could

SUBMITTER: Abraham AD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4908654 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature