Posttraining lesions of the amygdala interfere with fear-potentiated startle to both visual and auditory conditioned stimuli in C57BL/6J mice

The fear-potentiated startle paradigm has been used with great success to e xamine conditioned fear in both rats and humans. The purpose of the present experiment was to extend the authors' previous findings and further valida te the fear-potentiated startle paradigm in mice, in Experiments 1 and 2, C 57BL/6J mice were given Pavlovian fear conditioning with either an auditory or a Visual conditioned stimulus. Similar to data collected with rats, fea r-potentiated startle was observed for both stimulus modalities. In Experim ent 3, posttraining lesions of the amygdala disrupted fear-potentiated star tle in both conditioned stimulus modalities. These data are consistent with amygdala lesion studies in rats and suggest that fear-potentiated startle in mice requires an intact amygdala. Together, these results extend the aut hors' previous results and provide the basis for using this well-understood behavioral paradigm for examining the molecular mechanisms of conditioned fear in transgenic and knockout mice.