Backward conditioning: mediation by the context.
The information acquired in backward conditioning (i.e., outcome-->cue) was assessed in 3 Pavlovian lick-suppression experiments with water-deprived rats as subjects. Experiment 1 confirmed previous research that few outcome-->cue pairings made the cue into a conditioned excitor and additionally showed that massive posttraining extinction of the training context attenuated a backward-trained cue's excitatory value. Experiment 2 found that many outcome-->cue pairings made the cue into a conditioned inhibitor and that the same context manipulation attenuated this inhibitory value. Experiment 3 confirmed the observations of Experiments 1 and 2 and demonstrated that these effects of context extinction were specific to backward-trained cues conditioned in the extinguished context. These results are interpreted in terms of cue-->context and context-->outcome associations.
Chang
Raymond C
RC
Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, New York 13902-6000, USA.
Blaisdell
Aaron P
AP
Miller
Ralph R
RR
D000818:Animals; D001245:Association Learning; D003214:Conditioning, Classical; D004326:Drinking; D005260:Female; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D012193:Reversal Learning