Experimental renewal in human participants.

Abstract

Two experiments with human participants are presented that differentiate renewal from other behavioral effects that can produce a response after extinction. Participants played a video game and learned to suppress their behavior when sensor stimuli predicted an attack. Contexts (A, B, & C) were provided by fictitious galaxies where the game play took place. In Experiment 1, participants who received conditioning in A, extinction in B, and testing in A showed some context specificity of conditioning during extinction and a recovery of suppression on test. Experiment 2 demonstrated recovery of extinguished responding when participants were conditioned in A, extinguished in B, and tested in C, a third, neutral context. The experiment also demonstrated that the context of extinction did not control performance by becoming inhibitory. Results are discussed in terms of mechanisms that can produce a response recovery after extinction. The experiments demonstrated a renewal effect: a response recovery that was not attributable to the contexts acting as simple conditioned stimuli and is the first work with human participants to conclusively do so.

Contextual modulation of mirror and countermirror sensorimotor associations.

“…The blue armrest was covered with a fine-grain plastic material. Display backgrounds (Cook et al, 2010;Nelson et al, 2011) and lighting changes (Van Gucht, Vansteenwegen, Beckers, & Van den Bergh, 2008;Vansteenwegen et al, 2005) have been shown to be effective context manipulations in single-room procedures.…”

Contextual control of conditioning is not affected by extinction in a behavioral task with humans

“…Participants were initially screened to remove those who failed to learn the basic task during the first phase. Participants for whom suppression ratios on two out of the last three trials of the first phase of conditioning were not lower than the first trial were to be excluded (see also Nelson et al 2011b). In previous reports using this method (e.g., Nelson et al 2011aNelson et al , 2012 we excluded participants who had low pre-CS responding (average <5) as that procedure was successful in eliminating the occasional pre-CS response rate of zero for which calculation of a suppression ratio would be uninterpretable.…”

“…The present experiment used the same parameters as were used in the first two attention-arousing phases of that study. The design is shown in Table 1 There is considerable evidence that context changes with the method are easily discernible Sanjuan 2006, 2008;Nelson et al 2011b;Nelson et al 2012Nelson et al , 2013), nevertheless we included four additional groups to ensure that is the case with the present samples and parameters. All four of these groups received conditioning and extinction of X in the same way as did Group With Extinction.…”

“…The task is a video game where participants learn to suppress their baseline rate of mouse-clicking in preparation for unavoidable attacks from an enemy spacecraft in the presences of sensors. The task has successfully demonstrated contextual control of extinction (i.e., renewal) in the absence of evidence for direct context-outcome associations (Nelson et al 2011b) as well as context-specificity of both latent inhibition (Nelson and Sanjuan 2006) and perceptual learning (Nelson and Sanjuan 2008). Importantly, the task has been used to provide evidence that attention to contexts is aroused by extinction .…”

“…According to ATCP it is not that contextual control necessarily favors secondlearning (Bouton 1993;Nelson 2002Nelson , 2009 or interfering information (Nelson and Callejas-Aguillera 2007), but it simply favors any learning that occurs in a context that is receiving attention. Nelson et al (2011b) reiterate the well appreciated fact that the renewal effect and its explanatory constructs are of extensive relevance to psychology as they concern any issue where multiple things might be learned about a single event (see Bouton 1993Bouton , 2004, for review). The effect and its underlying constructs have application to diverse phenomena such as emotional intelligence (Nelson and Bouton 2002), perceptual learning (e.g., Sanjuan 2008, 2009), and emotional regulation (Nelson 2013).…”