Extinction of a Pavlovian-conditioned inhibitor leads to stimulus-specific inhibition
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Extinction of a Pavlovian-conditioned inhibitor leads to stimulus-specific inhibition Cody W. Polack 1 & Mario A. Laborda 1,2 & Ralph R. Miller 1
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2019
Abstract Conditioned inhibitors have been shown to be largely unaffected by non-reinforced exposure (i.e., extinction treatment). Although excitatory associations are readily diminished by extinction treatment, so-called inhibitory associations appear to be largely immune to them. In two fear-conditioning experiments with rats, it was found that a decrease in inhibitory control can result from a massive number of extinction exposures to the inhibitor. Experiment 1 provided evidence that extinction treatment attenuated negative summation between the potential inhibitor and a transfer excitor. However, the extinction treatment had no influence on responding to the original training compound, indicating that some stimulus-specific inhibitory potential remained even after massive extinction. Experiment 2 indicated that retarded excitatory acquisition to the inhibitory stimulus observed after extinction treatment of the inhibitor is no greater than that following a similar amount of stimulus pre-exposure without prior inhibition training (i.e., latent inhibition). The findings indicate that inhibitory associations can be extinguished with large numbers of extinction trials, but they appear to be much more resistant to extinction than excitatory associations. Keywords Extinction of conditioned inhibition . Stimulus specificity . Stimulus configuration . Summation test . Retardation test
Introduction In contrast to conditioned excitatory stimuli, reducing the behavioral influence of conditioned inhibitory stimuli has been notoriously difficult to accomplish. In particular, the observation that inhibitory stimulus control persists after repeated exposure to the inhibitor alone (i.e., extinction treatment) was long ago identified as a critical failing of the widely cited Rescorla and Wagner (1972; R-W) model of Pavlovian conditioning (Williams, Overmier, & LoLordo, 1992; see Miller, Barnet, & Grahame, 1995, for a broad critique of the R-W model). The problem with the R-W model’s account of conditioned inhibition is that inhibitory learning is treated as being completely symmetrical to excitatory learning based on the assumption that excitation and inhibition represent a continuum of associative strength (Rescorla, 1969; see Savastano, Cole, Barnet, & Miller, 1999, for an account of inhibitory
* Ralph R. Miller [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000, USA
2
University of Chile, Santiago, Chile
stimulus control that does not use negative valued associations or inhibitory associations). The R-W model represents associations between a given cue and a potential outcome as a single associative value that changes as a function of experience with the cue. A positive value reflects excitation, that is, the presentation of the cue foreshadows the occurrence of the ou
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