Contributions of anterior perirhinal cortex to olfactory and contextual fear conditioning

The present experiments examined the effects of excitotoxic lesions of anterior perirhinal cortex (PRH) on the expression of fear conditioned to an explicit olfactory CS and to the context in which CS-US pairing took place. Animals with anterior PRH lesions exhibited an attenuation of fear conditioned to the explicit CS, but no attenuation of fear conditioned to the training context. These data replicate previous findings in our laboratory examining the effects of aspirative lesions of anterior PRH, and are consistent with the notion that this cortical region comprises a critically important component of the neural system mediating the acquisition and/or expression of associations between olfactory cues and footshock.