Acceso usuarios
Priya R. van Vooren, Mathijs Franssen, Tom Beckers, Dirk Hermans, F. Baeyens
The aim of this study was to delineate the minimal conditions for extinction of Pavlovian modulation in humans. Previous experiments at our lab showed that, after X ? A+/A� acquisition training, X� trials did not extinguish differential X ? A+/A� responding, while X ? A� trials did. Additionally, X ? A� extinction training seemed only to extinguish differential X ? A+/A� responding, while leaving differential responding on a concurrently trained Y ? B+/B� discrimination intact. It thus seemed that the X ? A+/A� discrimination can only be extinguished by X ? A� extinction trials. (Rescorla, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes 12, 16�24, 1986), on the other hand, found that the minimal conditions for extinction were broader in pigeons: Namely, he found that an acquired X ? A+/A� discrimination could be extinguished by presenting the original feature X in combination with a different target (B) that was minimally trained as an exciter. We thus wanted to examine whether this was also the case in humans. We found that nonreinforced X ? B� presentations did not abolish discriminative X ? A/A responding when target B was a nonreinforced stimulus. Nonreinforced X ? B� trials did extinguish the X ? A+/A� discrimination when target B had previously been trained as a target for modulation (X ? B+/B� or Y ? B+/B� training) or as a reinforced exciter (B+). Our results thusf parallel and extend those in nonhuman animals (Rescorla, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes 12, 16�24, 1986).
