Ventral hippocampal lesions affect anxiety but not spatial learning

Rats with cytotoxic ventral hippocampal lesions which removed approximately 50% of the hippocampus (including dentate gyrus) starting from the temporal pole, displayed a reduction in freezing behaviour following the delivery of an unsignalled footshock in an operant chamber. This was more plausibly...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Behavioural brain research 2003-02, Vol.139 (1), p.197-213
Main Authors: Bannerman, D.M, Grubb, M, Deacon, R.M.J, Yee, B.K, Feldon, J, Rawlins, J.N.P
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amphetamine - pharmacology
Analysis of Variance
Animals
Anxiety
Anxiety - pathology
Anxiety - physiopathology
Anxiety - psychology
Discrimination Learning - physiology
Fear - psychology
Feeding Behavior - physiology
Freezing
Hippocampus
Hippocampus - pathology
Hippocampus - physiology
Hypokinesia
Locomotor activity
Male
Maze Learning - physiology
Motor Activity - drug effects
Motor Activity - physiology
Rat
Rats
Sensitisation
Space Perception - drug effects
Space Perception - physiology
Spatial memory
Ventral
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Summary:Rats with cytotoxic ventral hippocampal lesions which removed approximately 50% of the hippocampus (including dentate gyrus) starting from the temporal pole, displayed a reduction in freezing behaviour following the delivery of an unsignalled footshock in an operant chamber. This was more plausibly a result of reduced susceptibility to fear than a result of a lesion-induced increase in general motor activity. There was no consistent difference between sham and lesioned animals in spontaneous locomotor activity, or locomotion following acute or chronic treatment with amphetamine. In contrast, ventral hippocampal lesioned animals were quicker to pass from the black to the white box during a modified version of the light/dark exploration test, and were quicker to begin eating during tests of hyponeophagia. Furthermore, rats with ventral hippocampal lesions defecated less than their sham counterparts both during open field testing and in extinction sessions following contextual conditioning. In contrast to these clear lesion effects, there were no signs of any spatial learning impairment either in the watermaze or on the elevated T-maze. Taken together these results suggest that the ventral hippocampus may play a role in a brain system (or systems) associated with fear and/or anxiety, and provide further evidence for a distinct specialisation of function along the septotemporal axis of the hippocampus.
ISSN:0166-4328
1872-7549
DOI:10.1016/S0166-4328(02)00268-1