Chapter 5 Summary

Conditioning can be remembered very well over time. The forgetting that occurs can often be alleviated by reminder treatments, which suggests that forgetting does not necessarily mean a permanent loss from the memory store. Two major causes of forgetting are interference in which something learned at some other point in time interferes with the target memory and retrieval failure in which the target memory is not accessed because the context has changed.
Extinction phenomena involve both of these processes. Extinction itself results from retroactive interference rather than destruction of the original CS-US association. Extinction performance, however, depends a great deal on the context for retrieval. When the context is changed after extinction, extinction is not retrieved, and a recovery of responding known as the “renewal effect” occurs.
The passage of time theoretically causes a change of context. Spontaneous recovery is therefore the renewal effect that occurs when the temporal context changes after extinction. Spontaneous recovery and the renewal effect can both be alleviated by cues that remind the subject of extinction. Other paradigms that involve interference may involve similar retrieval principles. One example is counterconditioning; another example is latent inhibition.
Memories need to be consolidated before they are stabilized in long-term memory. When a stable memory is reactivated by presenting relevant retrieval cues, it becomes unstable again and needs to be reconsolidated. It is possible to impair even a stabilized memory by interfering with the reconsolidation process.
Stimuli can “set the occasion” for a target CS’s association with the US. Occasion setting often arises in serial feature-positive and feature-negative discriminations. Occasion setters differ from ordinary CSs in at least three ways: They influence the behavior that is controlled by the target, they are not affected by changing their direct associations with the US, and they do not influence performance to all CSs.
The target CS in occasion setting has properties that are similar to an extinguished CS. That is, the target CS seems to have both excitatory and inhibitory associations with the US that result from reinforcement and nonreinforcement, respectively. Occasion setters appear to operate by modulating the target’s inhibitory association with the US.
The conditioned response to the CS is not really the same as the unconditioned response to the US. Sometimes the two appear to be opposites, with the CR compensating for the UR. The nature of the CS also influences the form of the CR.
“Responses” are things that are generated by the central nervous system. True URs must therefore be produced by the brain or the spinal cord. Drug USs often have peripheral physiological effects that masquerade as a real response. Instead, they are stimuli that cause a compensatory reaction from the nervous system. This compensatory UR leads to the conditioning of a compensatory CR.
Conditioning enables whole “behavior systems” that are functionally organized to deal with the US. The behavior that results from classical conditioning is therefore quite rich and variable. Different types of CSs may support different components of the behavior system. That is why both the qualitative nature of the CS and the length of the CS-US interval are important in determining the form of the CR.