McConnell Bridget L, Miguez Gonzalo, Miller Ralph R
University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Learn Behav. 2013 Jun;41(2):119-37. doi: 10.3758/s13420-012-0090-6.
Four conditioned suppression experiments with rats, using an ABC renewal design, investigated the effects of compounding the target conditioned excitor with additional, nontarget conditioned excitors during extinction. Experiment 1 showed stronger extinction, as evidenced by less renewal, when the target excitor was extinguished in compound with a second excitor, relative to when it was extinguished with associatively neutral stimuli. Critically, this deepened extinction effect was attenuated (i.e., more renewal occurred) when a third excitor was added during extinction training. This novel demonstration contradicts the predictions of associative learning models based on total error reduction, but it is explicable in terms of a counteraction effect within the framework of the extended comparator hypothesis. The attenuated deepened extinction effect was replicated in Experiments 2a and 3, which also showed that pretraining consisting of weakening the association between the two additional excitors (Experiments 2a and 2b) or weakening the association between one of the additional excitors and the unconditioned stimulus (Experiment 3) attenuated the counteraction effect, thereby resulting in a decrease in responding to the target excitor. These results suggest that more than simple total error reduction determines responding after extinction.
四项以大鼠为对象的条件性抑制实验采用了ABC更新设计，研究了在消退过程中将目标条件性兴奋物与额外的非目标条件性兴奋物进行复合的影响。实验1表明，当目标兴奋物与第二个兴奋物复合进行消退时，相对于与联想中性刺激一起消退，消退效果更强，表现为更新更少。关键的是，当在消退训练期间添加第三个兴奋物时，这种加深的消退效应会减弱（即出现更多更新）。这一新颖的证明与基于总误差减少的联想学习模型的预测相矛盾，但在扩展比较器假设的框架内，根据抵消效应可以解释。减弱的加深消退效应在实验2a和3中得到了重复，这两个实验还表明，由削弱两个额外兴奋物之间的关联（实验2a和2b）或削弱其中一个额外兴奋物与无条件刺激之间的关联（实验3）组成的预训练减弱了抵消效应，从而导致对目标兴奋物的反应减少。这些结果表明，不仅仅是简单的总误差减少决定了消退后的反应。
