The Rostral Anterior Cingulate Cortex Modulates the Efficiency of Amygdala-Dependent Fear Learning

Abstract

Background: The rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) and the amygdala consistently emerge from neuroimaging studies as brain regions crucially involved in normal and abnormal fear processing. To date, however, the role of the rACC specifically during the acquisition of auditory fear conditioning still remains unknown. The aim of this study is to investigate a possible top-down control of a specific rACC sub-region over amygdala activation during pavlovian fear acquisition. Methods: We performed excitotoxic lesions, temporal inactivation, and activation of a specific sub-region of the rACC that we identified by tracing studies as supporting most of the connectivity with the basolateral am..