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.
Selective activation of locus coeruleus noradrenergic terminals drives anxiety-like behaviors through activation of β-adrenergic receptors in the basolateral amygdala.
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.
Basolateral amygdala excitatory neurons are a highly heterogenous collection of neurons that spatially covary in molecular, cellular, and circuit properties.
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.
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.
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.
Blocking input from basolateral amygdala to gustatory cortex (GC) severely reduces the coherence of GC ensemble activity, which negatively affects epochal dynamics involved in driving palatability-driven consumption.
The bidirectional orbitofrontal cortex-basolateral amygdala circuit helps us to learn the details of predicted rewarding events and then to use that information to make good reward pursuit decisions.
