Spontaneous recovery of extinguished fear responses deepens their extinction: a role for error-correction mechanisms

A series of experiments used a within-subject design to study spontaneous recovery of fear responses (freezing) to an extinguished conditioned stimulus (CS) in rats. Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 4 demonstrated that: a remotely extinguished CS elicited more freezing than a recently extinguished one on a common test; that the CS showing recovery underwent greater response loss across additional extinction than the one lacking recovery; and that spontaneous recovery and deepening of response loss survived reconditioning. Experiment 5 demonstrated that an excitor extinguished in compound with a CS showing recovery suffered greater loss than an excitor extinguished in compound with a CS not showing recovery, implying that the differential change is regulated by a common error term. Experiments 6 and 7 demonstrated that extinction of a compound composed of two CSs, one showing recovery and a second lacking recovery, produced greater loss to the CS that showed recovery, implying that the change is also regulated by individual error term. Keywords: extinction, spontaneous recovery, fear, error correction