Extinction and Recovery in Associative Learning

描述(由申请者提供)：这个项目涉及到理解灭绝，即当巴甫洛夫信号或乐器动作在没有增强器的情况下反复出现时发生的学习表现的损失。灭绝是行为的一种基本现象，它提供了一种重要的工具，用于临床治疗，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灭绝会破坏原始学习，但消失的表现很容易恢复，而且几种恢复效应(如更新、恢复、快速再习得和自发恢复)表明，原始学习可能基本完好无损。此外，由于这些效应可以被解释为改变背景或“背景”的影响，它们表明，灭绝是由新的抑制性学习造成的，这种学习对学习的背景特别敏感。这个项目的目标是寻求对灭绝的综合理解，因为它在这些和其他反应-恢复过程中揭示出来。在老鼠身上进行的几组实验将分析消亡和其他形式的学习是如何随着时间的推移而影响的(“时间背景”的变化)。他们还将研究减少自发恢复的方法，并测试一个新的假设，解释为什么分布在时间上的练习可能比集中在时间上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(次级灭绝、同时恢复和复苏)，目的是将它们合并到一个统一的灭绝解释中。第三组实验将研究几种药物(d-环丝氨酸、育亨宾和AM404)的效果，这些药物被认为具有促进灭绝学习的潜力。虽然这类药物有望作为消亡疗法的辅助药物，但它们对消亡的影响，特别是这里正在研究的各种恢复(复发)过程，目前基本上是未知的。研究结果将加深我们对灭绝这一基本的行为和临床现象的理解，并将提出有助于促进灭绝学习的方法，从而将失误和复发降至最低。

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.