Leising Kenneth J, Wong Jared, Blaisdell Aaron P
Department of Psychology, Texas Christian University.
Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles.
J Exp Psychol Anim Learn Cogn. 2015 Oct;41(4):371-7. doi: 10.1037/xan0000076.
We investigated extinction and spontaneous recovery of spatial associations using a landmark-based appetitive search task in a touchscreen preparation with pigeons. Four visual landmarks (A, B, C, and D) were separately established as signals of a hidden reinforced target among an 8 × 7 array of potential target locations. The target was located above landmarks (LM) A and C and below B and D. After conditioning, A and B were extinguished. Responding to A and C was assessed on probe tests 2 days following extinction, whereas, B and D were tested 14 days after extinction. We observed spontaneous recovery from spatial extinction following a 14-day, but not a 2-day, postextinction retention interval. Furthermore, by plotting the spatial distribution of responding across the X and Y axes during testing, we found that spontaneous recovery of responding to the target in our task was due to enhanced spatial control (i.e., a change in the overall distribution of responses) following the long delay to testing. These results add spatial extinction and spontaneous recovery to the list of findings supporting the assertion that extinction involves new learning that attenuates the originally acquired response, and that original learning of the spatial relationship between paired events survives extinction. (PsycINFO Database Record
我们在触屏装置上对鸽子进行了一项基于地标的偏好性搜索任务，以此来研究空间关联的消退和自发恢复。在一个8×7的潜在目标位置阵列中，四个视觉地标（A、B、C和D）分别被设定为隐藏强化目标的信号。目标位于地标A和C上方，B和D下方。条件训练后，A和B被消退。在消退后第2天的探测测试中评估对A和C的反应，而在消退后第14天测试B和D。我们观察到，在14天而非2天的消退后保留间隔后，出现了空间消退的自发恢复。此外，通过绘制测试期间在X轴和Y轴上反应的空间分布，我们发现任务中对目标反应的自发恢复是由于测试延迟较长后空间控制增强（即反应的总体分布发生变化）。这些结果将空间消退和自发恢复添加到了一系列研究结果中，支持了这样一种观点：消退涉及新的学习，这种学习会减弱最初习得的反应，并且配对事件之间空间关系的原始学习在消退后依然存在。（《心理学文摘数据库记录》 ）
