Capitulo 2 Bouton

Behavioural Processes 84 (2010) 617–621

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Behavioural Processes
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/behavproc

Short report

Spontaneous recovery in human instrumental learning: Integration of information and recency to primacy shift
Luis Jesús López-Romero, Rodolfo García-Barraza, Javier Vila ∗
F.E.S. Iztacala, Universidad NacionalAutónoma de México, Mexico

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a b s t r a c t
This experiment was conducted to study the effect of changes in the retention interval (RI) on spontaneous recovery within an acquisition-test interference task. College students learned a reversal conditional discrimination to solve a task involving conflicting phases across two training phases. When the test was conductedimmediately after training, participants’ performance revealed recency, behaving according to the information received during the last phase. Performance after retention interval averaged the information received across phases, regardless of the length of the RI (1.5, 3, 24 or 48 h). These results are not in agreement with traditonal theories of spontaneous recovery as they predict a recency to primacyshift effect of the RI. An interpretation of spontaneous recovery based on a temporal weighting rule (TWR) is discussed. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received 2 February 2009 Received in revised form 5 November 2009 Accepted 11 January 2010 Keywords: Spontaneous recovery Recency to primacy shift Retention interval Humans

In the study of human and non-humananimal information retrieval, interference theories propose that if a cue is followed by different outcomes in successive phases, different cue-outcome associations are formed, and all of them are stored in memory. That is, a conditioned stimulus (CS) that has received conditioning and then extinction, develops two different meanings generating ambiguity. When a CS has different meanings theinformation that predominates during a test depends on the recovery cues used to reduce the interference (Bouton, 1993). This way, an extinguished conditioned response (CR) can be recovered when the test context is different from the test where extinction took place (renewal) or when the test is conducted some time after the extinction procedure is finished (spontaneous recovery). Spontaneous recovery hasbeen a problem for associative theories due to the fact that a non-associative interference mechanism between memories affects the behavior that has been construed as associative learning, that is, A+ memory (acquisition), against A− memory (extinction). This point of view implies the storing of two memories that compete in a delayed test resulting in the reduction of a retroactive interference ofA− over A+ (Bouton, 1991, 1993). A limitation of these theories is that they do not predict different degrees of recovery due to the recency–primacy transition or to the passing of time.

∗ Corresponding author at: División de Investigación y Posgrado, Facultad de Estudios Superiores, Iztacala, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Avenida de los Barrios No. 1, Los Reyes Iztacala, AP 314,Tlalnepantla, Edo Méx. 54096, Mexico. Tel.: +52 55 56 23 12; fax: +52 55 56 23 12 98. E-mail address: javila@campus.iztacala.unam.mx (J. Vila). 0376-6357/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2010.01.007

From the point of view of the information retrieval theories, the phenomenon of spontaneous recovery has been considered as based on the value of theretention interval (RI) between the last phase of training and the test. The result of this assumption is that the greater is the RI length, the greater should be the recovery of the first-learned association leading to recency to primacy shifts ˜ (Ellson, 1938; for a review see Pineno and Miller, 2005). In conditioning, recency effects may be easily observed when the same CS is paired with...