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Kushner

6 important questions on Kushner

What are the two types of fear conditioning?

- auditory fear conditioning: were only the auditory fear is triggered because the environment keeps changing > the tone predicts that the shock is coming, this is what is learned (a temporal association).
- contextual fear conditioning: put the animal in the same environment, so that the context predicts the shock.

Which brain part is important by fear condtioning?

The amygdala: the sensory info from the tone and the shock has become associated with each other and gained an emotional valence.

Which brain part is important for learning about space and memory?

The hippocampus: it stores a representation of the context.

How is the tone-shock formation formed?

The conditioned stimulus (in this case the shock) and the unconditioned stimulus (the bell) both produce an action potential. If these stimulus are combined they are triggered on the same time > resulting in a larger response. When both are active it produces LTP.

Can you overwrite a memory?

No, the fear memory can be inhibited by another memory. This fully relies on the plasticity of the cell.

What did Kushner tested?

They tested the effect of the use of CREB to rescue the fear response. Cells with CREB are more likely to participate in fear memory, but only if the mice were trained. There is a competition between the cells, cells with CREB are fastly prime to encode new fear memory infor.