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Updated: Jul 11, 2026

Extinction Training During the Reconsolidation Window Prevents Recovery of Fear
Published on: August 24, 2012
Degraded contingency revisited: posttraining extinction of a cover stimulus attenuates a target cue's behavioral
James E Witnauer1, Ralph R Miller
1Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Binghamton, NY 13902-6000, USA.
Abstract:
In a Pavlovian conditioning situation, unsignaled outcome presentations interspersed among cue-outcome pairings attenuate conditioned responding to the cue (i.e., the degraded contingency effect). However, if a nontarget cue signals these added outcomes, responding to the target cue is partially restored (i.e., the cover stimulus effect). In 2 conditioned suppression experiments using rats, the effect of posttraining extinction of the cover stimulus was examined. Experiment 1 found that this treatment yielded reduced responding to the target cue. Experiment 2 replicated this finding, while demonstrating that this basic effect was not due to acquired equivalence between the target cue and the cover stimulus. These results are consistent with the extended comparator hypothesis interpretation of the degraded contingency and cover stimulus effects.
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