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Context specificity of both acquisition and extinction of a Pavlovian conditioned response

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 me...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Starosta, Sarah, Uengoer, Metin, Bartetzko, Isabelle, Lucke, Sara, Güntürkün, Onur, Stüttgen, Maik C.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066607/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27918284
http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/lm.043075.116
Descripción
Sumario: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.