Valence and Salience Encoding in the Central Amygdala

The central amygdala (CeA) has emerged as an important brain region for regulating both negative (fear and anxiety) and positive (reward) affective behaviors. The CeA has been proposed to encode affective information in the form of valence (whether the stimulus is good or bad) or salience (how significant is the stimulus), but the extent to which these two types of stimulus representation occur in the CeA is not known. Here, we used single cell calcium imaging in mice during appetitive and aversive conditioning and found that majority of CeA neurons (~65%) encode the valence of the unconditioned stimulus (US) with a smaller subset of cells (~15%) encoding the salience of the US. Valence and salience encoding of the conditioned stimulus (CS) was also observed, albeit to a lesser extent. These findings show that the CeA is a site of convergence for encoding oppositely valenced US information.