The impact of context relevance during extinction learning

In two predictive-learning experiments, we investigated the role of the informational value of contexts for the formation of context-specific extinction learning. The contexts were each composed of two elements from two dimensions, A and B. In Phase 1 of each experiment, participants received acquisition training with a target cue Z in context A1B1 (the numbers assign particular values on the context dimensions). In Phase 2, participants were trained with conditional discriminations between two other cues, X and Y, for which only one of the two context dimensions was relevant. In a third phase, participants received extinction trials with cue Z in context A2B2. During a final test phase, we observed that a partial change of the extinction context disrupted extinction performance when the extinction context was changed on the dimension that had been trained as being relevant for the conditional discrimination. However, when the extinction context was changed on the irrelevant context dimension, extinction performance was not affected. Our results are consistent with the idea that relevant contexts receive more attention than do irrelevant contexts, leading to stronger context-specific processing of information learned in the former than in the latter type of contexts.