Consideration of a unified model of amygdalar associative functions.
This paper considers issues arising from presentations by Barry Everitt and Gorica Petrovich concerning amygdalar involvement in appetitive conditioning. Studies reported by these researchers are beginning to unravel the distribution of associative functions among amygdalar nuclei and their efferent targets. The main issue addressed here concerns how to integrate the information from studies of appetitive conditioning with conclusions from studies of other forms of associative learning, including pavlovian fear conditioning and instrumental conditioning. Most students of this issue will agree that no prima facie integration is readily apparent in current scholarship. Although we do not here provide the definitive integration, we do attempt to take some preliminary, broad-brush steps towards that goal.
Department of Psychology, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA. mgabriel@uiuc.edu
Michael
M
Gabriel
Lauren
L
Burhans
Alireza
A
Kashef
D000679:Amygdala / Q000502:physiology*; D000818:Animals; D001245:Association Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D001362:Avoidance Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D003213:Conditioning, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D004525:Efferent Pathways / Q000502:physiology; D008959:Models, Neurological; D012201:Reward