Table 1.

Summary principles of extinction

Extinction is not the same as erasure Responding can return or “relapse” through spontaneous recovery, renewal, reinstatement, rapid reacquisition, resurgence The context plays a fundamental role in extinction “context” can be provided by exteroceptive background cues as well as interoceptive cues such as drug state, hormonal state, mood state, deprivation state, recent events, expectation of events, and time Extinction is at least partly a context-specific form of inhibitory learning Performance declines in extinction because of (1.) generalization decrement and (2.) the correction of prediction error Extinction is a retroactive interference paradigm that shares many features with other “interference paradigms” involving retroactive and/or proactive interference