CA3 NMDA Receptors are Required for the Rapid Formation of a Salient Contextual Representation

• Main Authors: McHugh, Thomas J. (Contributor), Tonegawa, Susumu (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biology (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Contributor), Picower Institute for Learning and Memory (Contributor), RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley Blackwell, 2012-11-15T17:45:15Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

The acquisition of Pavlovian fear learning engages the hippocampus when the conditioned stimuli are multimodal or temporally isolated from the unconditioned stimuli. By subjecting CA3-NR1 KO mice to conditioning protocols that incorporate time-dependent components, we found that the loss of plasticity at recurrent CA3 synapses resulted in a deficits in contextual conditioning specifically when the exposure to the context was brief or when the unconditioned stimulus was signaled with a competing, predictive unimodal stimulus. Our results suggest CA3 contributes both speed and salience to contextual processing and support the theory of competition between multimodal and unimodal conditioned stimuli for associative learning.