Extinction and Recovery in Associative Learning

描述（由申请人提供）：该项目涉及理解消失，即当巴甫洛夫信号或工具性动作在没有强化物的情况下反复呈现时发生的习得表现的丧失。灭绝是自然的基本现象。它为临床治疗提供了一个重要的工具，旨在消除人类不想要的想法、情绪和行为。虽然人们很容易认为，消失会破坏原始的学习，但消失的表现很容易恢复，并且几种恢复效应（例如，更新、恢复、快速再习得和自发恢复）表明，原始学习可能在很大程度上是完整的。此外，由于这些影响可以被解释为改变背景或“环境”的影响，他们认为，消退是由新的抑制性学习产生的，这种学习对学习的环境特别敏感。该项目的目标是寻求对灭绝的综合理解，因为它揭示了这些和其他响应-恢复过程。几组以老鼠为实验对象的实验将分析灭绝和其他形式的学习如何受到时间流逝（“时间背景”的变化）的影响。他们还将研究减少自发恢复的方法，并检验一个新的假设，解释为什么在时间上分散的练习可能比在时间上集中的练习产生更好的学习效果。另一组实验将分析一组不同的灭绝和恢复效应（次生灭绝、同步恢复和复苏），目的是将它们纳入一个统一的灭绝解释。第三组实验将研究几种被认为有可能促进灭绝学习的药物（d-环丝氨酸、育亨宾和AM404）的作用。虽然这类药物有望作为消失疗法的辅助手段，但它们对消失的影响，特别是在这里研究的各种恢复（复发）过程，目前基本上是未知的。研究结果将增加我们对消退这一基本行为和临床现象的理解，并将提出有助于促进消退学习的方法，以尽量减少消退和复发。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project is concerned with understanding extinction, the loss of learned performance that occurs when a Pavlovian signal or an instrumental action is repeatedly presented without its reinforcer. Extinction is a fundamental phenomenon of .behavior, and it provides a crucial tool used in clinical treatments designed to eliminate unwanted thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in humans. Although it is tempting to assume that extinction destroys the original learning, extinguished performance readily recovers, and several recovery effects (e.g., renewal, reinstatement, rapid reacquisition, and spontaneous recovery) indicate that the original learning may be largely intact. In addition, because these effects can be interpreted as effects of changing the background or "context," they suggest that extinction results from new inhibitory learning that is especially sensitive to the context in which it is learned. The goal of this project is to seek an integrated understanding of extinction as it is revealed in these and other response-recovery processes. Several sets of experiments with rat subjects will analyze how extinction and other forms of learning are influenced by the passage of time (a change in the "temporal context"). They will also examine ways to reduce spontaneous recovery and test a new hypothesis explaining why practice that is distributed in time may produce better learning than practice that is massed in time. Another set of experiments will analyze a different set of extinction and recovery effects (secondary extinction, concurrent recovery, and resurgence) with the goal of incorporating them in a unified account of extinction. A third set of experiments will study the effects of several drugs (d-cycloserine, yohimbine, and AM404) that are thought to have potential for facilitating extinction learning. Although such drugs hold promise as adjuncts to extinction therapy, their effects on extinction and especially the various recovery (relapse) processes under investigation here are essentially unknown at present. The results will increase our understanding of extinction, a fundamental behavioral and clinical phenomenon, and will suggest ways to help promote extinction learning so as to minimize lapse and relapse.