The inhibitory avoidance task contains both classical and operant conditioning components and is extensively used for studying the neural bases for formation and expression of emotion memory. While the amygdala is proposed to have a unique position for encoding, storing and retrieving memory in Pavlovian fear conditioning, extant data from manipulative studies on the inhibitory avoidance task showed that other brain regions by subserving various roles in processing different properties of the task are also involved in formation and expression memory of this task. Memory formation in this task requires the amygdala, hippocampal formation, bed nucleus of stria terminalis, nucleus accumbens, medial prefrontal cortex, as well as other cortical and subcortical regions. Expression of recent memory in this task relies on, among others, the amygdala, hippocampus and nucleus accumbens, but expression of remote memory in this task relies on cortical regions. Neural correlates for this task have been recently detected in the amygdala and hippocampus. These findings suggest that the memory operation in an inhibitory avoidance task entails a neural circuit distributing beyond the amygdala and undergoing a temporally dynamic change after acquisition.