Abstract
Studies of contextual fear conditioning have found that ethanol administered prior to a conditioning session impairs the conditioned freezing response during a test session the next day. The present experiments examined the effects of ethanol on extinction, the loss of conditioned responding that occurs as the animal learns that a previously conditioned context no longer signals shock. Ethanol (1.5 g/kg) administered prior to single (Experiment 1) or multiple (Experiment 2) extinction sessions impaired extinction. Ethanol administered prior to a test session disrupted the expression of freezing after extinction (Experiments 3-5). There was some evidence that ethanol served as an internal stimulus signaling the operation of conditioning or extinction contingencies (Experiments 4-5). In Experiment 6, postsession injections of 1.5 g/kg ethanol had no effect on extinction with brief (3 min) or long (24 min) exposures to the context, but injections of 3 g/kg after long exposures impaired extinction. Together, these results indicate that ethanol affects extinction by acting on multiple learning and performance processes, including attention, memory encoding, and memory expression.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1280-1292 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Behavioral Neuroscience |
Volume | 121 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 2007 |
Keywords
- consolidation
- fear
- hippocampus
- memory
- reconsolidation
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Behavioral Neuroscience