The contextual brain: implications for fear conditioning, extinction and psychopathology

By Stephen Maren, K. Phan, Israel Liberzon. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2013

1,457 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Contexts surround and imbue meaning to events; they are essential for recollecting the past, interpreting the present and anticipating the future. Indeed, the brain's capacity to contextualize information permits enormous cognitive and behavioural flexibility. Studies of Pavlovian fear conditioning and extinction in rodents and humans suggest that a neural circuit including the hippocampus, amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex is involved in the learning and memory processes that enable context-dependent behaviour. Dysfunction in this network may be involved in several forms of psychopathology, including post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia and substance abuse disorders.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/689490bea44de4df2b4fff0038380b62b28b1890

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Citations in the corpus

The Persistence and Transience of Memory. (2017, background): “The contextual dependence of memory is one example of this strategy: by maintaining orthogonal patterns, memories that are encoded in a particular context are more likely to be expressed in that context, but not other contexts (Maren et al., 2013).”
Vagus Nerve as Modulator of the Brain–Gut Axis in Psychiatric and Inflammatory Disorders (2018, background): “It is highly important for the contextual retrieval of fear memories after extinction (154).”
Don't fear ‘fear conditioning’: Methodological considerations for the design and analysis of studies on human fear acquisition, extinction, and return of fear (2017, positive): “Thereby, computer background screens, oom illumination, odours, or different physical rooms have been sed to create experimental contexts in fear conditioning research Maren et al., 2013; Urcelay and Miller, 2014).”
Pleasure systems in the brain (2015, background): “The amygdala is especially crucial for fear-related learning of passive responses to threats, such as freezing to a Pavlovian cue that predicts footshock (LeDoux, 2012; Maren et al., 2013).”
Brain-Machine Interfaces: From Basic Science to Neuroprostheses and Neurorehabilitation. (2017, background): “Differences in neuronal firing patterns produced under these two different conditions, according to our view, reflect the brain’s ability to contextualize information (527).”
Abstract context representations in primate amygdala and prefrontal cortex (2015, background): “In those studies, contexts are typically defined by a set of sensory stimuli appearing during presentation of a CS (Hobin et al., 2003; Maren et al., 2013; Orsini et al., 2013); these paradigms do not require the brain to activate an internal, uncued representation of context to respond…”
Loss of Ensemble Segregation in Dentate Gyrus, but not in Somatosensory Cortex, during Contextual Fear Memory Generalization (2016, background): “When animals experience an aversive event (unconditioned stimulus: US), they acquire a fear memory associated with the specific context of the event (Maren et al., 2013).”
Using Neuroscience to Help Understand Fear and Anxiety: A Two-System Framework. (2016, background): “Medial cortical areas down-regulatetheamygdala inhealthyhumans(25,37),andthis capacity is weakened in people with anxiety disorders (26, 27).”