Renewal of an extinguished conditioned response has been demonstrated in humans and in animals using various types of procedures, except renewal of motor learning such as eyeblink conditioning. We tested renewal of delay and trace eyeblink conditioning in a virtual environment in an ABA design. Following acquisition in one context (A, e.g., an airport) and extinction in a different context (B, e.g., a city), tests for renewal took place in the acquisition (A) and extinction context (B), in a counterbalanced order. Results showed renewal of the extinguished conditioned response in the delay but not trace condition.Contexts play an important role in the learning and expression of conditioned responses (CRs). In conditioning experiments, the preponderant view is that, while CRs following training generalize across contexts, extinguished CRs are context-specific (Bouton 2004). The context dependence of extinction has been demonstrated in renewal experiments in which, following acquisition training in one context (A), extinction training takes place in a different context (B). Extinction performance is then tested in a context different from the extinction context. Under these conditions, fear reemerges or renews following a return to the original acquisition context (ABA design) (Bouton 2004).Renewal is a robust effect, which has been documented in animals in appetitive and aversive conditioning as well as in flavor aversion learning (see Bouton 2002). Recently, renewal has also been demonstrated in humans using various aversive conditioning procedures and various types of CRs (Vansteenwegen et al. 2005;Alvarez et al. 2007). These results confirm that extinction of aversive conditioning is highly sensitive to contextual information while conditioned fear is not. However, less is known about contextual influence on motor learning such as eyeblink conditioning (EBC) in humans and in animals.There is some evidence that the context does not influence EBC as it does other forms of CR in rodents. For example, Penick and Solomon (1991) showed that, following conditioning of the nictitating membrane with a puff, a switch in context disrupted substantially the expression of the CR (Penick and Solomon 1991). However, a subsequent study did not replicate these results (Lindquist and Brown 2004). Another study found that the expression of CRs was substantially reduced after postacquisition exposure to the acquisition context relative to a home-cage control condition (Poulos et al. 2006). So far, we are not aware of any study that has investigated renewal of an extinguished CR in an EBC paradigm in humans or in animals. The main aims of this study were to examine whether EBC generalized across contexts and renewed in an ABA design in humans.During EBC, puff of air to the eye (US: unconditioned stimulus) is paired repeatedly with a short-duration tone (CS: conditioned stimulus), causing subjects to blink (unconditioned response). Following several tone-puff pairings, a conditioned eyeblink response develops subsequent to the tone...