Conditioned suppression is an inverted-U function of footshock intensity
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Updated: May 19, 2026

A Procedure for Studying the Footshock-Induced Reinstatement of Cocaine Seeking in Laboratory Rats
Published on: January 6, 2011
James E Witnauer1, Ralph R Miller
1State University of New York, Brockport, NY, USA.
Abstract:
Most theories of associative learning assert that conditioned responding to a target cue is a monotonically increasing function of unconditioned-stimulus (US) intensity. In a lick suppression preparation with rats, a cue was paired with a 0.4-, 0.6-, 0.8-, 1.0-, 1.2-, or 1.4-mA footshock in Experiment 1a, and with a 0.3-, 0.8-, 1.3-, or 1.8-mA footshock in Experiment 1b. Subsequent suppression in response to the cue was an inverted-U function of the US intensity. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that massive extinction of the training context and compound conditioning can each attenuate the response decrement caused by training with a high-intensity US. The sometimes-competing-retrieval model (Stout & Miller, Psychological Review 114:759-783, 2007) provides a better fit to these data than do several other models of associative learning.
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