Reinstatement as renewal produced by associative changes in context

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Behavioral Neuroscience
• Learning and Memory

Background:

• Reinstatement is the recovery of extinguished responses to a cue.
• This phenomenon is thought to involve changes in context-outcome associations.
• Understanding these changes is crucial for explaining response renewal.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if changes in context-outcome associations between extinction and testing drive response reinstatement.
• To manipulate context-outcome associations during conditioning, extinction, and testing phases.
• To determine the role of context-outcome associations in the renewal of extinguished responding.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments used a space-shooter video game to study response reinstatement.
• Participants learned stimulus-response-outcome associations (R-O1) and underwent extinction.
• Context-outcome associations were manipulated using unsignaled stimuli (O2) or their absence across phases.

Main Results:

• Strong recovery of extinguished responding occurred when O2 was present during conditioning and pre-test, but absent during extinction.
• A smaller recovery was observed when O2 was absent during conditioning and pre-test, but present during extinction.
• Response recovery was dependent on prior O2 conditioning, suggesting it's not simple disinhibition.

Conclusions:

• Context-outcome associations significantly influence response reinstatement.
• Changes in these associations between learning phases are key to renewal of extinguished behavior.
• The findings support the role of associative changes in explaining reinstatement phenomena.