Selective activation of locus coeruleus noradrenergic terminals drives anxiety-like behaviors through activation of β-adrenergic receptors in the basolateral amygdala.
Optogenetic approaches in young and aged rats define multiple roles for basolateral amygdala in guiding intertemporal choice, and show that these roles change across the lifespan.
The release of acetylcholine in the basolateral amygdala is precisely timed to salient events during reward learning but has long-lasting effects that potentiate learning of cue-reward contingencies.
Rat orbitofrontal cortex is required to accurately represent outcome distributions, whereas basolateral amygdala is necessary for the facilitation of learning in response to surprising events.
Basolateral amygdala excitatory neurons are a highly heterogenous collection of neurons that spatially covary in molecular, cellular, and circuit properties.
Sst+ interneurons drive feedforward inhibition in the basolateral amygdala, and thus provide a framework for why interneuron subtypes may mediate different archetypal circuit motifs across different brain regions.
Behavior- or optogenetic-driven activation of a basolateral amygdala projection to the nucleus accumbens enhances infralimbic cortex activity and long-term fear extinction.
Early life adversity led to hyper-innervation from the basolateral amygdala to the prefrontal cortex earlier in females than males and disrupted maturation of functional connectivity, which predicted anxiety-like outcomes.
When the fear-enhancing effects of prior exposure to stress are absent, the expression of fear reflects normal neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, not stress-induced hyperactivity in the amygdala.
