ORBITOFRONTAL CORTEX AND BASOLATERAL AMYGDALA ENCODE EXPECTED OUTCOMES DURING LEARNING

Reciprocal connections between the orbitofrontal cortex and the basola teral nucleus of the amygdala may provide a critical circuit for the l earning that underlies goal-directed behavior. We examined neural acti vity in rat orbitofrontal cortex and basolateral amygdala during instr umental learning in an olfactory discrimination task. Neurons in both regions fired selectively during the anticipation of rewarding or aver sive outcomes. This selective activity emerged early in training, befo re the rats had learned reliably to avoid the aversive outcome. The re sults support the concept that the basolateral amygdala and orbitofron tal cortex cooperate to encode information that may be used to guide g oal-directed behavior.