Figure 10.

Generalization to unfamiliar contexts during Stage II of systems consolidation. During Stage II of the systems consolidation process, hippocampal and cortical versions of a context’s representation compete for activation. If the generalization of fear from a conditioned context A that is in Stage II to an unfamiliar context B is tested, the context A representation that will be activated prior to forming a representation of B depends on the degree of similarity of the two contexts. If they are fairly similar, the fear expression will be as it would be if the representation were in Stage I. However, if the contexts are not fairly similar, the fear expression will be as it would be if context A’s representation were in Stage III. The reason for this difference is that when the new context B is very similar to A, the B_Rep of hipp Rep A is greater than that of cortical Rep A because A and B are similar, but Z_rec of the Hippocampal rep is greater than that of the Cortical one, and hence the hippocampal rep is the one activated until Rep B is created. However, if new context B is substantially different from A, B_Rep of Hippocampal Rep A is less than that of Cortical Rep A because context B is dissimilar to A, and the hippocampal representation has both a higher Z_rec and more discrepant associated attributes than the cortical one. Note that irregularities in the above curves occur because the arguments of some functions used in the computations must be integers. The irregularities are due to the need to round some values to the nearest integer.