Renewal of Retroactive Interference in Pavlovian Conditioning: The Effect of Outcome Valence on Expectancy Learning...

In retroactive associative interference, an interfering association between a cue X and an outcome O2 is trained to disrupt the expression of a previously learned association between X and an outcome O1. Associative interference is stronger when X is presented in the interference context used to train the X-O2 association than in the acquisition context used to train the X-O1 association (ABA renewal). Three experiments are reported that assessed the impact of the valences of O1 and O2 on the efficiency of interference and its susceptibility to ABA renewal in both the cognitive domain (assessed through outcome expectancy) and the emotional domain (assessed through evaluative conditioning). The results are consistent with prior reports of a dissociation between cognitive and emotional measures. In the cognitive domain, general contextual modulation of expectancy learning occurred regardless of the valence of the outcomes. When testing occurred in the acquisition context, interference was less efficient when both the O1 and O2 outcomes were appetitive. In the emotional domain, contextual modulation occurred only when O1 was aversive and O2 either appetitive or neutral. An appetitive O2 increased the cue valence only when O1 was aversive and tested in the interference context, while an aversive O2 lowered it when O1 was either appetitive or neutral. Neutral O2 slightly increased the cue valence when O1 was aversive and decreased it when O1 was appetitive.