Extinction of Conditioned Behaviour (Chapter 10)

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Enhancing Extinction: Implications for Exposure Therapy

How do we enhacne exteinction?

We want the extinction procedure to maintain its longevity over time

  • More trials = stronger suppression

  • Increasing the intertrial interval produces more enduring suppression (e.g., spacing it out, dealing with it more on your own and warding off against spontaneous recovery)

  • Multiple contexts — extinction trials/procedures in multiple contexts means you’re more likely to generalize that extinction procedure across contexts

  • Take an extinction reminder cue with you — think of AA: they celebrate your achievements in sobriety with tokens — they are reminders of the process. Recovering alcoholics will often keep their tokens with them.

  • COmpoundin extnicton stimuli — if you do mutliple extinction sessions simultaneously, the process will take longer, but it will be deeper learning: for smokers, it is sometimes suggested to quit smoking while you quit something else (overexpectation will wekaen the strength of predictors)

    • Rescorla (2006)

      • 3 discriminative stimuli; light, tone, or noise which are all predicitve of the reward

      • All underwent extinction individually, and in a similar way

      • Light and noise continue extinction procedure together

        • Initially, two cues recover extinction

        • As it’s carried out across trials in the absence of the reward, the compound stimuli

        • 6 days break between compound trials and test trials

        • individual extinction of tone Y was learned, but wasn’t as resistant to extinction because of its indiviudal extinction procedure

  • S-O learning remains intact. What about R-O learning?

    • Test the specificity of reinstatement (Ostlund and Balleine, 2007)

    • Maintained memory of which lever did what after extncition, which is R-O association

What is Learned Extinction?

  • If S-O and R-O associations remain intact after extinction, then what produces the response decrement?

  • Inhibitory S-O learning takes place.

Paradoxical Extinction Effects

  • Overtraining Extinction Effect

    • More extensive reinforcement training leads to more rapid extinction

      • Produced by using rapid continuous reinforcement

      • Frustration is greater during non-reinforcement

      • Learning instrumental behaviour super well → you know quicker when it’s not working compared to not having learnt it so well

  • Partial Reinforcement Extinction Effect

    • Greater persistence in instrumental responding in extinction after partial (or intermittent) reinforcement training than after continuous reinforcement training

      • Extinction is slower, and frustration is less

      • E.g.,: something has been partially reinforced on a schedule

      • Example: throwing tantrum worked once, so bratty kid continues because they know it worked once (pays off occasionally, which is enough to keep persistence going)

    • Discrimination Hypothesis:

    • Learned Persistence:

      • Frustration Theory (A. Amsel):

      • Sequential Theory (E.J. Capaldi):

Mechanisms