Spontaneous recovery and ABC renewal from retroactive cue interference

Two conditioned suppression experiments with rats were conducted to determine whether the spontaneous recovery and renewal that are commonly observed in retroactive outcome interference (e.g., extinction) also occur in retroactive cue interference. Experiment 1 showed that a long delay between Phase 2 (the interfering phase) and testing produces a recovery from the cue interference (i.e., the delay enhanced responding to the target cue trained in Phase 1), which is analogous to the spontaneous recovery effect observed in extinction and other retroactive outcome interference procedures. Experiment 2 showed that, when target and interfering cues are trained in separate contexts and testing occurs in a different but familiar context, a recovery from the cue interference is also observed (i.e., the context shift enhanced responding to the target), which is analogous to ABC renewal from extinction. The results are discussed in terms of the possibility that similar associative mechanisms underlie cue and outcome interference.