Renewal and spontaneous recovery after extinction in a causal-learning task

Abstract

Three experiments were conducted with the aim of studyng extinction, and extinction related phenomena using a causal-learning task in human beings. Experiment 1 found that the excitatory asscociation between a ficttious medicine and an illness can be extinguished by repeated exposure to the medicine without the illness. Experiment 2 found spontaneous recovery of that asscociation when the test was conducted 48 hr after the end of the extinction. Experiment 3 found renewal of the association when the test was conducted in the acquisition cotext after receiving extinction in a different context. This pattern of results is adequately explained by the retrieval theory proposed by bouton (1993). suggesting a generaiity of extinction learning across species and tasks.