Extinction and response inhibition

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Humans and other animals readily learn to perform an action if it is “reinforced” by a reward and will extinguish the action if it stops being reinforced. Popular models of learning describe extinction as the automatic outcome of a prediction-error correction process that gradually weakens, and eventually eliminates, the response-reward association. But there is much evidence that conditioned responses are not eliminated and can be quickly restored. Other evidence suggests that extinction might involve more specific inhibitory processes that suppress the response without eliminating the original learning. The current project investigates the role of response inhibition in the extinction of learned responses in humans.