ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2020
Revaluing the Role of vmPFC in the Acquisition of Pavlovian Threat Conditioning in Humans.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 72 papers.
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Who cites it
72 citing papers in PubMed, 116 citations in OpenAlex.
- Opposing sensitive period effects of early and late childhood maltreatment on corticolimbic responses in fear conditioning.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- The emergence of neuropsychiatric symptoms in preclinical Alzheimer's disease: An emotion regulation perspective.Neuron · 2026Review
- Neural Reinstatement of Encoding Context Mediates the Switch between Fear and Extinction Recall.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Functional connectivity between the nucleus accumbens and amygdala underlies avoidance learning during adolescence: Implications for developmental psychopathology.Development and psychopathology · 2025Article
- The Orbitofrontal Cortex Underlies Consolidation of Pavlovian Anticipatory Arousal Responses in Macaque Monkeys.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neural Representation of Associative Threat Learning in Pulvinar Divisions, Lateral Geniculate Nucleus, and Mediodorsal Thalamus in Humans.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Lesion to the vmPFC abolishes intentionality (mis)attribution in the Knobe effect.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Subregions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrate threat and protective information to meta-represent safety.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Current State of the Neuroscience of Fear Extinction and Its Relevance to Anxiety Disorders.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Cortisol Imbalance and Fear Learning in PTSD: Therapeutic Approaches to Control Abnormal Fear Responses.Current neuropharmacology · 2025Review
- Neuropsychobiology of fear-induced bradycardia in humans: progress and pitfalls.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Review
- Adaptive Safety Coding in the Prefrontal Cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- The ventromedial prefrontal cortex in response to threat omission is associated with subsequent explicit safety memory.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The Impact of C-3 Side Chain Modifications on Kynurenic Acid: A Behavioral Analysis of Its Analogs in the Motor Domain.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- Towards a Real-Life Understanding of the Altered Functional Behaviour of the Default Mode and Salience Network in Chronic Pain: Are People with Chronic Pain Overthinking the Meaning of Their Pain?Journal of clinical medicine · 2024Review
- Distributed neural representations of conditioned threat in the human brain.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Neural Correlates and Molecular Mechanisms of Memory and Learning.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- Targeting Human Glucocorticoid Receptors in Fear Learning: A Multiscale Integrated Approach to Study Functional Connectivity.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Review
- Neural substrates of parallel devaluation-sensitive and devaluation-insensitive Pavlovian learning in humans.Nature communications · 2023Article
- From CGRP to PACAP, VIP, and Beyond: Unraveling the Next Chapters in Migraine Treatment.Cells · 2023Review
12 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in human pavlovian threat conditioning has been relegated largely to the extinction or reversal of previously acquired stimulus-outcome associations. However, recent neuroimaging evidence questions this view by also showing activity in the vmPFC during threat acquisition. Here we investigate the casual role of vmPFC in the acquisition of pavlovian threat conditioning by assessing skin conductance response (SCR) and declarative memory of stimulus-outcome contingencies during a differential pavlovian threat-conditioning paradigm in eight patients with a bilateral vmPFC lesion, 10 with a lesion outside PFC and 10 healthy participants (each group included both females and males). Results showed that patients with vmPFC lesion failed to produce a conditioned SCR during threat acquisition, despite no evidence of compromised SCR to unconditioned stimulus or compromised declarative memory for stimulus-outcome contingencies. These results suggest that the vmPFC plays a causal role in the acquisition of new learning and not just in the extinction or reversal of previously acquired learning, as previously thought. Given the role of the vmPFC in schema-related processing and latent structure learning, the vmPFC may be required to construct a detailed representation of the task, which is needed to produce a sustained conditioned physiological response in anticipation of the unconditioned stimulus during threat acquisition.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.