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Exposure therapy is an effective intervention for anxiety-related problems. A mechanism of this intervention has been the extinction procedure in Pavlovian conditioning, and their findings have provided many effective intervention strategies that can promote the effect of and prevent relapse following exposure sessions. However, traditional associative theories that have explained Pavlovian conditioning cannot comprehensively explain their findings. In particular, it was difficult to explain the recovery-from-extinction effects, which is the reappearance of conditioned response following extinction. In this study, we propose a new associative model that can deal with procedures that promote an effect of extinction and many recovery-from-extinction effects. The cores of this model are that the asymptotic strength of the inhibitory association depends on the degree of excitatory association retrieved in a context in which CS is presented and that the retrieval is determined by the similarity between contexts during reinforcement and non-reinforcement and the present context. Moreover, this model assumes that these similarities change under specific conditions. By adding these assumptions to the traditional framework, many difficulties in explaining these phenomena can be resolved. Our model can provide not only a new perspective in associative learning, but also many implications for exposure therapy.

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