Recovery of an overshadowed association achieved by extinction of the overshadowing stimulus

Abstract

Three experiments are reported in which conditioned lick suppression by water-deprived rats was used as an index of associative strength. In Experiment 1, overshadowing of a light by a tone was observed when the light-tone compound stimulus was paired with foot shock. After initial compound pairings, the tone-shock association was extinguished in one group of subjects. Subsequently, these animals demonstrated significantly higher levels of suppression to the light relative to a control group in which the tone had not been extinguished. Experiment 2 replicated this effect while failing to find evidence to support the possibilities that extinction presentations of the overshadowing tone act as retrieval cues for the light-shock association, or that, via second-order conditioning, the light-shock association is actually formed during extinction of the tone. Experiment 3 determined that the recovery from overshadowing observed in Experiments 1 and 2 was specific to the extinction of the overshadowing stimulus rather than the extinction of any excitatory cue. Collectively, these results suggest that the debilitated response to an overshadowed stimulus does not represent an acquisition failure, but rather the failure of an acquired association to be manifest in behavior.