Hippocampal long-term potentiation (LTP) has long been suspected to be involved in learning and memory, but definitive proof has been hard to come by. Two groups now report, however, that fear conditioning (which is a form of pavlovian conditioning) causes an increase in the strength of synapses in a region of the brain that is associated with learning and memory. Animals were trained to associate a tone with a foot shock, eliciting a response of ‘fear’. After training, this response occurred when the tone was given but the foot shock was not.
- Robert C. Malenka
- Roger A. Nicoll
