title: The ventral hippocampus supports a memory representation of context and contextual fear conditioning: implications for a unitary function of the hippocampus.
abstract: The authors report that either inactivating the ventral hippocampus (VH) with muscimol prior to context preexposure or injecting anisomycin into the VH after preexposure significantly impaired rats' memory for context. Injecting anisomycin into the VH prior to contextual fear conditioning also greatly reduced long-term memory (48-hr retention test) but had no effect on short-term memory (1-hr retention test) for contextual fear. Together with other results, these data suggest that the memory for a novel context is distributed throughout the longitudinal extent of the hippocampus and that this representation helps to support contextual fear conditioning.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA. jrudy@psych.colorado.edu
authors.forename: Jerry W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Rudy
authors.forename: Patricia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Matus-Amat
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003214:Conditioning, Classical; D005239:Fear; D018755:GABA Agonists / Q000494:pharmacology; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000293:injuries / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D009118:Muscimol / Q000494:pharmacology; D051381:Rats; D020318:Rats, Long-Evans
chemical_list: D018755:GABA Agonists; D009118:Muscimol