We recently reported that fear extinction, a form of inhibitory learning, is selectively blocked by systemic administration of L-type voltage-gated calcium channel (LVGCC) antagonists, including nifedipine, in mice. We here replicate this finding and examine three reduced contingency effects after vehicle or nifedipine (40 mg/kg) administration. In the first experiment, contingency reduction was achieved by adding USs to the training protocol (degraded contingency), a phenomenon thought to be independent of behavioral inhibition. In the second experiment, contingency reduction was achieved by varying the percentage of CS-US pairing, a phenomenon thought to be weakly dependent on behavioral inhibition. In the third and fourth experiments, contingency reduction was achieved by adding CSs to the training protocol (partial reinforcement), a phenomenon thought to be completely dependent on behavioral inhibition. We found that none of these reduced contingency effects was impaired by nifedipine. In a final experiment, we found that extinction conducted 1 or 3 h post-acquisition, but not immediately, was LVGCC-dependent. Taken together, the results suggest that reduced contingency effects and extinction depend on different molecular mechanisms and that LVGCC dependence of behavioral inhibition develops with time after associative CS-US learning.Pavlovian fear conditioning in rodents has been widely used in the laboratory setting to model human fear and anxiety, as well as excitatory learning and memory processes (Fendt and Fanselow 1999;Maren 2001;Ohman and Mineka 2001;Fanselow and Gale 2003;LeDoux 2003). Fear conditioning is achieved by temporally pairing an initially neutral conditional stimulus (CS), such as a tone, with an aversive unconditional stimulus (US), usually a mild footshock. Rats show robust fear responding to a CS with as little as one CS-US pairing (Fanselow 1990). Extinction of conditional fear, the progressive weakening of the fear response by repeated presentations of the CS alone, has been an important model in the development of behavior therapy for human anxiety disorders (Wolpe 1969;Wolpe and Rowan 1988;Craske 1999;Myers and Davis 2002) and is the prototypical procedure for inducing inhibitory learning (Davis et al. 2003;Delamater 2004).While the molecular and cellular mechanisms of fear acquisition have been intensely studied for decades, the mechanisms of fear extinction are only beginning to be unraveled. For instance, lesion and local infusion studies suggest that the amygdala (Falls et al. 1992;Quirk et al. 1997;Lu et al. 2001;Marsicano et al. 2002;Royer and Pare 2002;Walker et al. 2002;Davis et al. 2003;Ledgerwood et al. 2003; Lin et al. 2003a,b,c) and prefrontal cortex (Morgan et al. 1993;Quirk et al. 2000;Herry and Garcia 2002;Milad and Quirk 2002;Santini et al. 2004;Shah et al. 2004) participate in the learning and retention of fear extinction. Additionally, both local infusion and systemic behavioral pharmacology studies have identified important roles in extinction for the NMDA-type ...