Lesions of the ventral hippocampus (VH) but not the dorsal hippocampus (DH) reduce the expression of conditioned freezing to a discrete, auditory stimulus (Trivedi & Coover, SFN, 2002). This complements other findings that VH lesions reduce freezing to context cues. VH lesions also reduce passive avoidance of the open arms on the elevated T-maze anxiety test (Coover & Trivedi, SFN, 2002). To further examine whether VH damage reduces fear, rats were tested in the present experiment for fear-potentiation of the auditory startle response (ASR) using trace-conditioning procedures. Subjects were male, albino, Charles-River derived Sprague-Dawley rats aged 65-70 days at the time of surgery. One week after receiving lesions of the VH or the dorsal hippocampus (DH), or sham surgery, they were given 3 daily sessions of 10 trials of presentation of a 3.8-s white-noise CS followed after a 12-sec period of silence (trace interval) by a 0.5-s footshock of .8 mA intensity. On Day 4, the rats were tested for fear-potenti...