Putting Fear in Its Place: Remapping of Hippocampal Place Cells during Fear Conditioning
Open accessAbstract
We recorded hippocampal place cells in two spatial environments: a training environment in which rats underwent fear conditioning and a neutral control environment. Fear conditioning caused many place cells to alter (or remap) their preferred firing locations in the training environment, whereas most cells remained stable in the control environment. This finding indicates that aversive reinforcement can induce place cell remapping even when the environment itself remains unchanged. Furthermore, contextual fear conditioning caused significantly more remapping of place cells than auditory fear conditioning, suggesting that place cell remapping was related to the rat's learned fear of the environment. These results suggest that one possible function of place cell remapping may be to generate new spatial representations of a single environment, which could help the animal to discriminate among different motivational contexts within that environment.
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Hippocampal cells exhibit plasticity of their place fields in response to contextual fear conditioning.
“Moreover, hippocampal cells exhibit plasticity of their place fields in response to contextual fear conditioning (Moita et al. [185]; Moita et al. [186])”
From The Temporal Dynamics Model of Emotional Memory Processing: A Synthesis on the Neurobiological Basis of Stress-Induced Amnesia, Flashbulb and Traumatic Memories, and the Yerkes-Dodson Law (2007) · cites this paper as Moita et al. [186]
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- Authors
- Moita, M. A. P., Rosis, S., Zhou, Y., LeDoux, J. E., & Blair, H. T.
- Affiliations
- Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (PT)
- University of California, Los Angeles (US)
- New York University (US)
- Venue
- The Journal of Neuroscience
- Publisher
- Society for Neuroscience
- Published
- 2004-08-04
- Volume
- 24
- Issue
- 31
- Pages
- 7015-7023
- ISSN
- 0270-6474 (ISSN-L)
- 1529-2401
- PMC
- PMC6729593
- OpenAlex
- W2093069982
- Cited by
- 251
- References
- 6
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 15 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 13 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 13 · 2016: 7 · 2015: 12 · 2014: 11 · 2013: 11 · 2012: 19
- FWCI
- 4.88
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Journal of Neuroscience (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology (RCAAP Project by FCT) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (5k02mh000956-07)
- National Institute of Mental Health (MH12341, MH 46516, MH 00956, R37MH038774, F32MH012341, R01MH038774, R01MH046516, MH38774)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory and Neural Mechanisms
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience › Neuroscience and Neuropharmacology Research
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Developmental Neuroscience › Neurogenesis and neuroplasticity mechanisms
- Keywords
- place cells, fear conditioning, contextual fear, auditory fear, spatial representation, aversive reinforcement, rats, motivational context
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Conditioning, Psychological, Fear, Hippocampus, Male, Rats, Sprague-Dawley, Rats
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