Open AccessJournal Article
Gradual extinction prevents the return of fear: implications for the discovery of state
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TLDR
This paper showed that gradually reducing the frequency of aversive stimuli, rather than eliminating them abruptly, prevents the recovery of fear, which has important implications for theories of state discovery in reinforcement learning.Abstract:
Fear memories are notoriously difficult to erase, often recovering over time. The longstanding explanation for this finding is that, in extinction training, a new memory is formed that competes with the old one for expression but does not otherwise modify it. This explanation is at odds with traditional models of learning such as Rescorla-Wagner and reinforcement learning. A possible reconciliation that was recently suggested is that extinction training leads to the inference of a new state that is different from the state that was in effect in the original training. This solution, however, raises a new question: under what conditions are new states, or new memories formed? Theoretical accounts implicate persistent large prediction errors in this process. As a test of this idea, we reasoned that careful design of the reinforcement schedule during extinction training could reduce these prediction errors enough to prevent the formation of a new memory, while still decreasing reinforcement sufficiently to drive modification of the old fear memory. In two Pavlovian fear-conditioning experiments, we show that gradually reducing the frequency of aversive stimuli, rather than eliminating them abruptly, prevents the recovery of fear. This finding has important implications for theories of state discovery in reinforcement learning.read more
Citations
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Don't fear 'fear conditioning': Methodological considerations for the design and analysis of studies on human fear acquisition, extinction, and return of fear
Tina B. Lonsdorf,Mareike M. Menz,Marta Andreatta,Miguel A. Fullana,Armita Golkar,Jan Haaker,Ivo Heitland,Andrea Hermann,Manuel Kuhn,Onno Kruse,Shira Meir Drexler,Ann Meulders,Frauke Nees,Andre Pittig,Jan Richter,Sonja Römer,Youssef Shiban,Anja Schmitz,Benjamin Straube,Bram Vervliet,Julia Wendt,Johanna M.P. Baas,Christian J. Merz +22 more
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Behavioral and neurobiological mechanisms of pavlovian and instrumental extinction learning.
TL;DR: A review of the behavioral neuroscience of extinction can be found in this article, where a behavior that has been acquired through Pavlovian or instrumental learning decreases in strength when the outcome that reinforced it is removed.
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Discovering latent causes in reinforcement learning
TL;DR: The principles of latent causal inference may provide a general theory of structure learning across cognitive domains, and are reviewed with a focus on Pavlovian conditioning.
References
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Book
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction
TL;DR: This book provides a clear and simple account of the key ideas and algorithms of reinforcement learning, which ranges from the history of the field's intellectual foundations to the most recent developments and applications.
Journal ArticleDOI
A model for Pavlovian learning: Variations in the effectiveness of conditioned but not of unconditioned stimuli.
John M. Pearce,Geoffrey Hall +1 more
TL;DR: A new model is proposed that deals with the explanation of cases in which learning does not occur in spite of the fact that the conditioned stimulus is a signal for the reinforcer by specifying that certain procedures cause a conditioned stimulus to lose effectiveness.
Journal ArticleDOI
Fear memories require protein synthesis in the amygdala for reconsolidation after retrieval
TL;DR: It is shown that consolidated fear memories, when reactivated during retrieval, return to a labile state in which infusion of anisomycin shortly after memory reactivation produces amnesia on later tests, regardless of whether reactivation was performed 1 or 14 days after conditioning.
Journal ArticleDOI
Context and Behavioral Processes in Extinction.
TL;DR: Evidence that extinction does not destroy the original learning, but instead generates new learning that is especially context-dependent is reviewed, consistent with behavioral models that emphasize the role of generalization decrement and expectation violation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Time, rate, and conditioning.
Charles R. Gallistel,John Gibbon +1 more
TL;DR: The authors draw together and develop previous timing models for a broad range of conditioning phenomena to reveal their common conceptual foundations: first, conditioning depends on the learning of the temporal intervals between events and the reciprocals of these intervals, the rates of event occurrence.