DOI:10.6129/CJP.201912_61(4).0004
中華心理學刊 民108，61 卷，4 期，321-340
Chinese Journal of Psychology 2019, Vol.61, No.4, 321-340

Keng-Chen Liang（Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University）；Der-Yow Chen（Department of Psychology, National Cheng-Kung University）；Shih-Dar Chang（Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University）

Abstract

This review focuses on the research for physiological psychology of fear memory done in our laboratory, specifically on the roles of the amygdala and hippocampus in contextual fear conditioning. We present findings to suggest that the hippocampus is involved not only in representing the context of conditioning but also in associating it to an electric shock. The hippocampal GABAergic and cholinergic systems mediated the context representation and context-shock association respectively. These findings demand revising the prevailing model of contextual fear conditioning: In short, the brain may store two engrams for the context-shock association in such conditioning, one relying on the amygdala for a simple reflexive association of CS and US, while the other on the hippocampus for combinatorial binding of all cues in a conditioning episode. These findings, in relating to those from the local and other laboratories, invite re-thinking on the concept of functional localization in the brain.

Keywords: conditioned reflex, configural memory, context representation, functional localization, shock association