Four experiments tested context switch effects on acquisition and extinction in human predictive learning. A context switch impaired probability judgments about a cue-outcome relationship when the cue was trained in a context in which a different cue underwent extinction. The context switch also impaired judgments about a cue trained in a context different from the extinction context, whenever this training was concurrent with extinction of another cue. After extinction, new cue-outcome relationships learned, even in a different task, became context specific. Moreover, renewal was consistently observed. It is suggested that context switch effects result from a process by which ambiguity leads participants to attend to the contexts.
Spontaneous forgetting is often attributed to retrieval failure caused by natural changes in the background context that occur over time. However, some investigators have argued that the contextchange account of forgetting is paradoxical, because context-change effects themselves decrease over time. To resolve the paradox, we have suggested that organisms may merely forget the physical context as the temporal context in which it is embedded changes; this explanation accepts a fundamental similarity between time and physical context. The present experiment tested an implication of this analysis by examining the interaction between retention interval and context change in rats after a taste aversion was conditioned and then extinguished. Importantly, subjects tested at the longer (24-day) retention interval received reminder exposure to the physical contexts before testing. Under these conditions, retention interval and context change both caused relapse of the extinguished aversion (spontaneous recovery and renewal, respectively), and the strongest overall relapse was observed when the two treatments were combined. Such additivity (rather than interactivity) is consistent with a context-change account of forgetting and sets the stage for resolution of the contextforgetting paradox.It is now common to suppose that spontaneous forgetting in humans and animals is caused by changes that naturally occur in the background context over time (e.g
Three experiments with rats examined retention interval and context switch effects factorially in the latent inhibition paradigm. In Experiment 1, a 28-day retention interval abolished a context switch effect on latent inhibition. In Experiment 2, re-exposure to the contexts before conditioning re-established the context switch effect at the 28-day interval. In this case, the retention interval and context switch effects were additive: Latent inhibition was weakest when the retention interval and context switch were combined. Experiment 3 replicated the context switch effect at the 28-day interval. The results suggest that context switch and retention interval effects may be based on the same process. Context switch effects may weaken over time because physical contexts are embedded in superordinate temporal contexts; animals fail to retrieve physical context when the temporal context changes. This view helps resolve a paradox that has been noted for contextual change theories of forgetting.
A conditioned taste aversion experiment tested context-switch effects on retrieval of conditioned stimulus (CS)-unconditioned stimulus (US) acquisition performance in rats. A context switch impaired performance when the target flavour was trained in a context where a different flavour underwent extinction. Conditioned taste aversion in the absence of previous extinction of the alternate flavour was not context dependent. It is suggested that the ambiguity in the meaning of the extinguished cue leads animals to pay attention to the context, so that the information learned in that context becomes context dependent.
Four experiments examined whether or not spontaneous recovery could occur after extinction in the conditioned taste-aversion paradigm. After three extinction trials, spontaneous recovery was obtained over an 18-dayretention interval (Experiments 1, 2, and 3). The effect was not due to changes in the unconditioned preference for saccharin over the retention interval (Experiment 2) or to an increase in a nonextinguished aversion over time, as indicated by tests with both the original, nonextinguished aversion (Experiment 1) and with a weaker one (Experiment 3). Spontaneous recovery was not obtained when extinction was overtrained (eight trials) and a 49-day retention interval was used (Experiment 4). However, saccharin intake at asymptote reached the level of baseline water intake, and not the highly preferred level shown by never-conditioned controls. Results of all four experiments suggest that extinction does not return an averted taste to the status of an unconditioned one.Nonreinforced exposure to a conditioned stimulus (CS) that has been previously paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US) yields a progressive decrease in the conditioned response (CR) that is known as extinction. Spontaneous recovery is the increase in the CR that is usually found when the CS is presented again in a test conducted after a retention interval. This well-known phenomenon was discovered by Pavlov (1927) at the beginning of the century, and is one of the main phenomena used to argue against the possibility that extinction causes unlearning of the original CS-US association.The present article is concerned with taste-aversion learning, in which a flavor is associated with illness. The resulting flavor aversion can be extinguished ifthe flavor is then repeatedly presented alone. However, to the best of our knowledge, no published work has reported spontaneous recovery of an aversion after extinction. A near exception is an experiment conducted by Kraemer and Spear (1992).
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