Learning to stop responding is a fundamental process in instrumental learning. Animals may learn to stop responding under a variety of conditions that include punishment—where the response earns an aversive stimulus in addition to a reinforcer—and extinction—where a reinforced response now earns nothing at all. Recent research suggests that punishment and extinction may be related manifestations of a common retroactive interference process. In both paradigms, animals learn to stop performing a specific response in a specific context, suggesting direct inhibition of the response by the context. This process may depend on the infralimbic cortex (IL), which has been implicated in a variety of interference-based learning paradigms including extinction and habit learning. Despite the behavioral parallels between extinction and punishment, a corresponding role for IL in punishment has not been identified. Here we report that, in a simple arrangement where either punishment or extinction was conducted in a context that differed from the context in which the behavior was first acquired, IL inactivation reduced response suppression in the inhibitory context, but not responding when it “renewed” in the original context. In a more complex arrangement in which two responses were first trained in different contexts and then extinguished or punished in the opposite one, IL inactivation had no effect. The results advance our understanding of the effects of IL in retroactive interference and the behavioral mechanisms that can produce suppression of a response.

中文翻译：

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下边缘皮层在工具性行为的惩罚和消除中起着类似的作用

学会停止反应是工具学习的一个基本过程。动物可能会在各种情况下学会停止反应，包括惩罚（反应除了得到强化物外还获得厌恶刺激）和灭绝（强化反应现在根本不会带来任何好处）。最近的研究表明，惩罚和灭绝可能是常见的追溯干扰过程的相关表现。在这两种范式中，动物都学会在特定环境下停止执行特定反应，这表明环境对反应的直接抑制。这个过程可能依赖于边缘下皮层（IL），它与各种基于干扰的学习范式有关，包括消退和习惯学习。尽管灭绝和惩罚之间在行为上有相似之处，但IL在惩罚中的相应作用尚未确定。在这里，我们报告说，在一个简单的安排中，惩罚或灭绝是在与首次获得行为的背景不同的背景下进行的，IL 失活减少了抑制背景下的反应抑制，但当它“更新”时没有反应在原来的上下文中。在更复杂的安排中，首先在不同的环境中训练两种反应，然后在相反的环境中消除或惩罚，IL 失活没有效果。这些结果增进了我们对 IL 在追溯干扰中的影响以及可产生反应抑制的行为机制的理解。