Conditioned inhibition produced by extinction-mediated recovery from the relative stimulus validity effect: a test of acquisition and performance models of empirical retrospective revaluation

Empirical retrospective revaluation is a phenomenon of Pavlovian conditioning and human causal judgment in which posttraining changes in the conditioned response (Pavlovian task) or causal rating (causal judgment task) of a cue occurs in the absence of further training with that cue. Two experiments tested the contrasting predictions made by 2 families of models concerning retrospective revaluation effects. In a conditioned lick-suppression task, rats were given relative stimulus validity training, consisting of reinforcing a compound of conditioned stimuli (CSs) A and X and nonreinforcement of a compound of CSs B and X, which resulted in low conditioned responding to CS X. Massive posttraining extinction of CS A not only enhanced excitatory responding to CS X, but caused CS B to pass both summation (Experiment 1) and retardation (Experiment 2) tests for conditioned inhibition. The inhibitory status of CS B is predicted by the performance-focused extended comparator hypothesis (J. C. Denniston, H. I. Savastano, & R. R. Miller, 2001), but not by acquisition-focused models of empirical retrospective revaluation (e.g., A. Dickinson & J. Burke, 1996; L. J. Van Hamme & E. A. Wasserman, 1994).