Section: New Results

Pavlovian conditioning

The fundamental role of the amygdala in pavlovian conditioning is widely acknowledged, both on the motor, autonomic and hormonal expression of pavlovian responses and on the learning of the associations between conditional and unconditioned stimuli. This year, we have proposed models showing in a systemic view how errors of prediction in the amygdala might trigger, by cholinergic hormonal expression, episodic learning in the hippocampus [17] and semantic learning and attentional shift in the posterior cortex [8] . On this basis, we are currently studying how emotional values of sensory information are dynamically encoded in the basolateral nucleus of the amygdala [11] , to fit with the multiple requirements for this kind of information in the brain.