Dataset Information

A Computational Model Integrating Multiple Phenomena on Cued Fear Conditioning, Extinction, and Reinstatement.

ABSTRACT: Conditioning, extinction, and reinstatement are fundamental learning processes of animal adaptation, also strongly involved in human pathologies such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and dependencies. Cued fear conditioning, extinction, restatement, and systematic manipulations of the underlying brain amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex, represent key experimental paradigms to study such processes. Numerous empirical studies have revealed several aspects and the neural systems and plasticity underlying them, but at the moment we lack a comprehensive view. Here we propose a computational model based on firing rate leaky units that contributes to such integration by accounting for 25 different experiments on fear conditioning, extinction, and restatement, on the basis of a single neural architecture having a structure and plasticity grounded in known brain biology. This allows the model to furnish three novel contributions to understand these open issues: (a) the functioning of the central and lateral amygdala system supporting conditioning; (b) the role played by the endocannabinoids system in within- and between-session extinction; (c) the formation of three important types of neurons underlying fear processing, namely fear, extinction, and persistent neurons. The model integration of the results on fear conditioning goes substantially beyond what was done in previous models.

SUBMITTER: Mattera A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7550679 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A Computational Model Integrating Multiple Phenomena on Cued Fear Conditioning, Extinction, and Reinstatement.

Mattera Andrea A Pagani Marco M Baldassarre Gianluca G

Frontiers in systems neuroscience 20200929

Conditioning, extinction, and reinstatement are fundamental learning processes of animal adaptation, also strongly involved in human pathologies such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and dependencies. Cued fear conditioning, extinction, restatement, and systematic manipulations of the underlying brain amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex, represent key experimental paradigms to study such processes. Numerous empirical studies have revealed several aspects and the neural s ...[more]

PMID: 33132856

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Project description:The extinction of contextual fear is commonly an essential requirement for successful exposure therapy for fear disorders. However, experimental work on extinction of contextual fear is limited, and there little or no directly relevant theoretical work. Here, we extend BACON, a neurocomputational model of context fear conditioning that provides plausible explanations for a number of aspects of context fear conditioning, to deal with extinction (calling the model BaconX). In this model, contextual representations are formed in the hippocampus and association of fear to them occurs in the amygdala. Representation creation, conditionability, and development of between-session extinction are controlled by degree of confidence (assessed by the Bayesian weight of evidence) that an active contextual representation is in fact that of the current context (i.e., is "valid"). The model predicts that: (1) extinction which persists between sessions will occur only if at a sessions end there is high confidence that the active representation is valid. It follows that the shorter the context placement-to-US (shock) interval ("PSI") and the less is therefore learned about context, the longer extinction sessions must be for enduring extinction to occur, while too short PSIs will preclude successful extinction. (2) Short-PSI deficits can be rescued by contextual exposure even after conditioning has occurred. (3) Learning to discriminate well between a conditioned and similar safe context requires representations of each to form, which may not occur if PSI was too short. (4) Extinction-causing inhibition must be applied downstream of the conditioning locus for reasonable generalization properties to be generated. (5) Context change tends to cause return of extinguished contextual fear. (6). Extinction carried out in the conditioning context generalizes better than extinction executed in contexts to which fear has generalized (as done in exposure therapy). (7) BaconX suggests novel approaches to exposure therapy.

Dataset Information

A Computational Model Integrating Multiple Phenomena on Cued Fear Conditioning, Extinction, and Reinstatement.

Publications

A Computational Model Integrating Multiple Phenomena on Cued Fear Conditioning, Extinction, and Reinstatement.

Similar Datasets

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