Can a reminder of extinction stop old learning coming back?
Showing people a cue from the extinction phase stopped a previously extinguished expectation from returning in a new context, while a cue from original learning let it return.
Source
Reminder Cues Modulate the Renewal Effect in Human Predictive Learning
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Two computer-based experiments with an ABC renewal design (acquisition in restaurant A, extinction in restaurant B, test in B and novel restaurant C); participants were randomly split into groups tested in C with either the acquisition reminder cue or the extinction reminder cue; Experiment II equated how often each cue was followed by the outcome.
- N
- Experiment I analysed 46 students (19 more excluded for poor learning); Experiment II analysed 58 students (21 more excluded). Each experiment had two groups; no pooled N is reported.
- Population
- University students at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany
- Outcome
- Percentage of 'stomach trouble' predictions to the target food in the extinction context versus a novel context at test (renewal), by reminder-cue group
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What they did
Students played a doctor predicting whether a patient would get stomach trouble after eating foods in different restaurants. A target food first caused trouble in one restaurant (acquisition, usually preceded by a picture of wine or coffee), then stopped causing trouble in a second restaurant (extinction, preceded by the other picture). At test, the food was shown without feedback in the extinction restaurant and in a new third restaurant, where one group saw the acquisition picture and the other saw the extinction picture. Experiment II repeated this but made each picture predict the outcome on half of its trials, so neither cue had its own link to stomach trouble.
What they found
In both experiments, the group tested with the acquisition cue predicted stomach trouble more in the new restaurant than in the extinction restaurant (renewal), whereas the group tested with the extinction cue showed no such return. The Context by Group interaction was large in Experiment I (partial eta squared 0.336) and smaller but still significant in Experiment II (0.178). Because the effect survived when the two cues had identical outcome histories, the cues seem to act by retrieving the whole learned episode rather than through their own direct link to the outcome.
The limits
What it doesn't show
There was no group tested without any reminder cue, so the study cannot tell whether the acquisition cue boosted renewal, the extinction cue suppressed it, or both; the authors say this must be tested directly. Many participants were excluded for failing to learn (19 in Experiment I and 21 in Experiment II), and samples were small student groups doing a short, low-stakes imagined medical task, so generalising to fear or to relapse in therapy is an extrapolation. The authors also note that a configural-learning account fits the data as well as their occasion-setting account, and that the cross-experiment comparison suggesting some direct cue-outcome learning should be treated with caution.
Key terms
- Extinction
- Learning that a cue no longer predicts an outcome after repeated presentations without that outcome; the original learning is suppressed rather than erased.
- Renewal effect
- The return of an extinguished response when the cue is encountered outside the context where extinction took place.
- ABC renewal
- A renewal design where acquisition, extinction and test each happen in a different context, so recovery occurs in a completely new context.
- Reminder (retrieval) cue
- A stimulus present during one learning phase that, when shown later, helps bring back the memory of that phase.
- Occasion setter
- A cue that does not predict the outcome itself but signals which learned cue-outcome relationship currently applies.
- Predictive learning task
- A human task in which participants learn from trial-by-trial feedback which cues predict an outcome, used as an analogue of conditioning.
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Quiz yourself
In an ABC renewal design, where does the test for renewal take place?
Common questions
Why does this matter for therapy?
Exposure therapy works like extinction, and relapse outside the clinic resembles renewal. If a cue from therapy sessions can carry the extinction memory into new settings, it might be used to protect treatment gains, though this study used a lab task, not patients.
What was the point of Experiment II?
In Experiment I the acquisition cue always came with the outcome and the extinction cue never did, so the cues could simply have been predicting the outcome themselves. Experiment II made each cue predict the outcome on only half of its trials, and the effect remained, ruling out that simple explanation.
Did the extinction cue completely prevent renewal?
In both experiments the extinction-cue group showed no reliable difference between the extinction context and the new context, so renewal was effectively absent in that group.
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