- E James Kehoe: School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia. j.kehoe@unsw.edu.au
The mechanisms of extinction were examined by reducing the intensity of the unconditioned stimulus (US) after acquisition training to determine whether such reductions lie on a continuum with CS-alone extinction. The experiments revealed that reductions in US intensity yielded extinction-like effects. Specifically, there were proportional reductions in the daily mean level of responding across sessions. There were also persistent within-session declines and between-session increases of responding analogous to spontaneous recovery. Surprisingly, even when US intensity was held constant, within-session declines and between-session increases were apparent. The results are discussed with respect to possible contributions from unlearning, new learning, generalization decrement, and nonassociative loss, especially CS-specific attentional changes and CR-specific reactive inhibition.