An interesting article came out in Nature (abstract and link below) providing more evidence that neural links between the hippocampus and amygdala are necessary for associative fear learning. This evidence reinforces the idea that to reduce / undo fear association learning, we need to focus on amygdala activity reducing training techniques and environmental constructs, such as:
- Training using positive reinforcement and pleasant stimuli, rather than aversives that may further activate the amygdala-hippocampus network.
- Deconditioning fear through methods less likely to trigger fear/panic: such as systematic desensitisation, cognitive activation and counter conditioning.
- Watching the animals body language to make sure you are not near the fear/panic threshold for the fear triggering stimuli while training so that the amgdala -hippocampal pathways are not activated and the associative memory strengthened.
- Increase oxytocin through stable, social interactions allowing supportive attachments to form
- Reduce overall environmental stress
“Abstract
In contextual fear conditioning, experimental subjects learn to associate a neutral context with an aversive stimulus and display fear responses to a context that predicts danger. Although the hippocampal–amygdala pathway has been implicated in the retrieval of contextual fear memory, the mechanism by which fear memory is encoded in this circuit has not been investigated. Here, we show that activity in the ventral CA1 (vCA1) hippocampal projections to the basal amygdala (BA), paired with aversive stimuli, contributes to encoding conditioned fear memory. Contextual fear conditioning induced selective strengthening of a subset of vCA1–BA synapses, which was prevented under anisomycin-induced retrograde amnesia. Moreover, a subpopulation of BA neurons receives stronger monosynaptic inputs from context-responding vCA1 neurons, whose activity was required for contextual fear learning and synaptic potentiation in the vCA1–BA pathway. Our study suggests that synaptic strengthening of vCA1 inputs conveying contextual information to a subset of BA neurons contributes to encoding adaptive fear memory for the threat-predictive context.”
Emma Lethbridge Horsemanship 