ABSTRACT
The power of the startle reflex (Landis & Hunt, 1939) as a tool to study complex processes such as attention and motivation was first highlighted by Graham (1975). Graham’s work, the work of Hoffman and Ison (1980) on startle in rats, and the work of Brown, Kalish, and Farber (1951) on the modification of startle by fear have motivated the work in our laboratory that has, over the past 20 years, attempted to: (a) determine the neural pathway involved in startle itself and (b) determine the neural pathways and cellular processes involved in startle modulation by higher order processes such as attention and fear. It is our progress toward these aims that I review in this chapter.
