Distinct recruitment of basolateral amygdala-medial prefrontal cortex pathways across Pavlovian appetitive conditioning.

ABSTRACT: Associative learning can enable environmental cues to signal food and stimulate feeding, independent of physiological hunger. Two forebrain regions necessary in cue driven feeding, the basolateral area of the amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex, communicate via extensive, topographically organized connections. The basolateral nucleus (BLA) sends extensive projections to the prelimbic cortex (PL), and our aim here was to determine if this pathway was selectively recruited during cue-food associative learning. The anterior and posterior basolateral nuclei are recruited during different phases of cue-food learning, and thus we examined whether distinct pathways that originate in these nuclei and project to the PL are differently recruited during early and late stages of learning. To acc

SUBMITTER: Keefer SE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5494146 | biostudies-literature | 2017 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature