EXTENDED TRAINING EXTINCTION EFFECT UNDER MASSED AND SPACED EXTINCTION TRAILS.

Recent decades of theorizing about social inference phenomena have seen a variety of models that partitioned the underlying processes into two qualitatively distinct types whose specific nature was depicted differently in the different frameworks. The present article reviews major such partitioning efforts as well as their proposed alternatives, and discusses their unique features, their commonalities, and the conceptual and empirical issues that they raise.

Conditioning, Psychological↗

PubMed2006

Concurrent excitors limit the extinction of conditioned fear in humans.

In a human fear conditioning experiment, with on-line expectancy ratings and electrodermal responding as indices of fear, two neutral stimuli (pictures of geometric shapes) were first established as reliable predictors of an electric shock. In the subsequent extinction phase, the two stimuli were repeatedly presented in compound, without the shock. The final test phase consisted of individual stimulus presentations again, which resulted in a strong return of the conditioned responses. This effect was not observed in non-conditioned control stimuli. Hence, behavioral effects of extinction seem highly specific to the stimulus constellation that has gone through the extinction procedure. We argue that pharmacological, behavioral and/or cognitive manipulations that could prevent configural processing of stimulus constellations have direct clinical potential.

Conditioning, Psychological↗

PubMed2006

Role of gamma-band synchronization in priming of form discrimination for multiobject displays.

Previous research has shown that synchronized flicker can facilitate detection of a single Kanizsa square. The present study investigated the role of temporally structured priming in discrimination tasks involving perceptual relations between multiple Kanizsa-type figures. Results indicate that visual information presented as temporally structured flicker in the gamma band can modulate the perception of multiple objects in a subsequent display. For judgments of both relative orientation and relative position of 2 rectangles, response time to identify and discriminate relations between the objects was consistently decreased when the vertices corresponding to distinct Kanizsa-type rectangles were primed asynchronously. Implications are discussed for models of the perception of objects and their interrelations.

Conditioning, Psychological↗