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Amygdala

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Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior
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Definition

The amygdala is a historically grouped complex of 13 nuclei in the brain, together receiving inputs from and projecting to nearly every part of the central nervous system, supporting a wide variety of functions including associative learning, emotional learning, and responsivity, as well as ingestive, sexual, and social behavior.

Introduction

The amygdala is a historically grouped complex of 13 nuclei in the brain, each differing in structure, connectivity, and function and together receiving inputs from and projecting to nearly every part of the central nervous system (Swanson and Petrovich 1998). Amygdala circuits support a wide variety of functions including associative learning, emotional learning, and responsivity, as well as ingestive, sexual, and social behavior (Aggleton 2000). Traditionally the amygdala has been divided into the basolateral (BLA), medial (MeA), central (CeA), and cortical (CoA) nuclei, and this will be the vastly oversimplified scheme used for the...

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References

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Correspondence to Eric J. Leonardis .

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Leonardis, .J. (2017). Amygdala. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1249-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1249-1

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