Behavioral neuroscience
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Behavioral neuroscience · Aug 1997
Normal conditioned inhibition and extinction of freezing and fear-potentiated startle following electrolytic lesions of medical prefrontal cortex in rats.
The authors investigated the role of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in the inhibition of conditioned fear in rats using both Pavlovian extinction and conditioned inhibition paradigms. In Experiment 1, lesions of ventral mPFC did not interfere with conditioned inhibition of the fear-potentiated startle response. ⋯ In both Experiments 2 and 3, extinction of fear to contextual cues was also unaffected by the lesions. These results indicate that ventral mPFC is not essential for the inhibition of fear under a variety of circumstances.