Amygdalo-striatal interaction in the enhancement of stimulus salience in associative learning

Function of the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) is critical to 2 aspects of attention in associative learning: the conditioning of orienting responses (ORs) to cues paired with food, and the enhancement of cue salience by the surprising omission of expected events. Such salience enhancements have been found to depend on interactions within a circuit that includes CeA, the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc), the substantia innominata (SI), and the posterior parietal cortex (PPC). The acquisition and expression of conditioned ORs requires interactions among CeA, SNc, and the dorsal lateral striatum (DLS), but not SI or PPC. Here, we considered whether CeA-DLS interactions are also important in surprise-induced salience enhancements in a serial prediction task. Rats received unilateral lesions of CeA and DLS, either contralaterally, which disrupted interactions between those structures, or ipsilaterally, which produced comparable damage to each structure but permitted interactions between them in 1 hemisphere. Rats with ipsilateral lesions of CeA and DLS showed the salience enhancements normally observed in this task, but rats with contralateral lesions of those structures did not. Thus, convergence of information processing by CeA and DLS is essential for surprise-induced salience enhancements, as well as for conditioned ORs.