Effects of several extinction treatments upon the integrity of Pavlovian stimulus-outcome associations

Abstract

Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer tests were used to assess the sensitivity of Pavlovian stimulus-outcome (S-O) associations to various extinction treatments in four appetitive conditioning experiments with rats. In Experiment 1, simple nonreinforcement of a stimulus was shown to have little impact on the ability of that stimulus to display outcome-specific transfer of control. Extinguishing a stimulus by pairing the stimulus with an alternative reinforcement in Experiment 2 also had no detectable effect on the S O associations as assessed with the outcome-specific transfer measure. The third and fourth experiments, respectively, examined the impact of postconditioning exposures to random and explicitly unpaired S-O contingencies upon previously learned S-O associations. These treatments, as well, had no detectable harmful effects upon the integrity of the S-O associations. In contrast to the consistent failures of various extinction treatments to influence the ability of stimuli to display outcome-specific transfer, these treatments often did reduce the strength of conditioned responding initially trained to these stimuli. These results support the view that extinction entails the preservation of S-O associations as well as the parallel development of inhibitory stimulus-response associations. Other notions of extinction are also discussed.