ABSTRACT
The goal of this chapter is to link together several separate issues in the study of associative learning. One issue is the interpretation of extinction, the loss of responding that occurs when a conditioned stimulus (CS) is presented without the unconditioned stimulus (US) many times following conditioning. A second is how the background of stimulation, or “context,” controls behavior in Pavlovian conditioning situations. One of the chapter's main messages is that context and extinction are intimately interrelated. I will suggest that the subject's knowledge about the current context is the main determinant of behavior in extinction, and that the context acts by signaling or retrieving the current relation between the CS and the US. Another major message is that what we know about the relation between context and extinction can be applied to a larger set of problems of which extinction is only an example. I will suggest that the context may play the same role in any Pavlovian “interference paradigm” in which a CS is associated with different events in different phases of the experiment.
