Backward Conditioning: Mediation by the Context

The information acquired in backward conditioning (i.e., outcome → cue) was assessed in 3 Pavlovian lick-suppression experiments with water-deprived rats as subjects. Experiment 1 confirmed previous research that few outcome → cue pairings made the cue into a conditioned excitor and additionally showed that massive posttraining extinction of the training context attenuated a backward-trained cue's excitatory value. Experiment 2 found that many outcome → cue pairings made the cue into a conditioned inhibitor and that the same context manipulation attenuated this inhibitory value. Experiment 3 confirmed the observations of Experiments 1 and 2 and demonstrated that these effects of context extinction were specific to backward-trained cues conditioned in the extinguished context. These results are interpreted in terms of cue → context and context → outcome associations.