title: Context specificity of both acquisition and extinction of a Pavlovian conditioned response.
abstract: It is widely held that the extinction of a conditioned response is more context specific than its initial acquisition. One proposed explanation is that context serves to disambiguate the meaning of a stimulus. Using a procedure that equated the learning histories of the contexts, we show that the memory of an appetitive Pavlovian association can be highly context specific despite being unambiguous. This result is inconsistent with predictions of the Rescorla-Wagner model of learning but in line with configural accounts of contextual control of behavior. We propose an explanatory model in which context serves to modulate the gain of associative strength and which expands upon the configural idea of unitary representations of context and conditioned stimuli.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology, Department of Biopsychology, Ruhr University Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany sstarost@cshl.edu.
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Starosta
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology, Section for Experimental and Biological Psychology, Philipps-University Marburg, 35037 Marburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Metin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Uengoer
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology, Department of Biopsychology, Ruhr University Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Isabelle
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Bartetzko
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology, Section for Experimental and Biological Psychology, Philipps-University Marburg, 35037 Marburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Sara
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lucke
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology, Department of Biopsychology, Ruhr University Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Onur
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Güntürkün
authors.affiliation: Institute of Pathophysiology & Focus Program Translational Neurosciences, University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, 55128 Mainz, Germany.
authors.forename: Maik C
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Stüttgen
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001244:Association; D010856:Columbidae; D003214:Conditioning, Classical; D004777:Environment; D005108:Extinction, Psychological; D005502:Food; D008568:Memory; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011581:Psychological Tests