Abstract
In three experiments, we assessed the role of signals for changes in the consequences of cues as a potential account of the renewal effect. Experiment 1 showed recovery of responding following extinction when acquisition, extinction, and test phases occurred in different contexts. In addition, extinction treatment in multiple contexts attenuated context-induced response recovery. In Experiment 2, we used presentations of an extraneous stimulus (ES), instead of context shifts, and found that responding recovered from extinction only when the ES was presented both between acquisition and extinction and between extinction and test. In Experiment 3, we used a reversal learning design in which, during training, two cues were first paired with different outcomes, then paired with the alternative outcomes, and finally paired again with the original outcomes. In this experiment, presentation, just prior to testing, of an ES that had previously been presented between the different phases produced an expectation of reversal in the meaning of the cues.
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O.P. was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education (Ref. EX2002-0739). We thank Jeffrey Amundson, Tom Beckers, Steven Stout, Gonzalo Urcelay, Kouji Urushihara, and Daniel Wheeler for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this article, as well as Danielle Gutter, Jamie Francis, and Leanne Scally for their assistance in running the experiments.
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Pineño, O., Miller, R.R. Signaling a change in cue-outcome relations in human associative learning. Animal Learning & Behavior 32, 360–375 (2004). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196034
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196034