Extinction may not result in occasion setting

Abstract

Three experiments with humans (two predictive-learning tasks, one behavioral task) examined the occasion-setting properties of extinction contexts. Extinction performance was attenuated when an extinguished stimulus was tested in a different context, regardless of whether another stimulus had been extinguished there (all experiments). Extinction in the test context had no effect on a non-extinguished stimulus (experiment 3). An extinction context had neither the properties of a negative occasion setter nor a conditioned inhibitor.