Abstract
Extinction of rats’ conditioned defensive freezing responses in a context associated with two bouts of massed shock (3 sec) separated by a long unreinforced interbout interval was slower than that in a context associated with distributed shock (60 sec). Resistance to extinction following two bouts of massed shock depended on the rats’ remaining undisturbed in the conditioning context during the long unreinforced interbout interval. Slow extinction of freezing was attributed to either the summation of temporal conditioning at the early and late session times or the formation of an association between the early and late bouts of shock. Importantly, the effects of the two bouts of massed shock could not be explained by what is known about the reinforcing effectiveness of massed shock.
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This research was supported by a grant from the. Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. I thank Elena Tinio, Kerry Sagness, and Orëlund Pennell for their assistance in conducting this re search, and Vin LoLordo for comments on a draft of this article.
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Williams, D.A. Slow extinction of conditioned responding following exposure to two bouts of massed shock. Animal Learning & Behavior 22, 203–213 (1994). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03199921
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03199921