The present experiments examined whether extinction of a stimulus predicting food affects the ability of that stimulus to energize instrumental performance to obtain food. We first used a general Pavlovian instrumental transfer (PIT) paradigm in which rats were first given Pavlovian conditioning with a stimulus predicting one type of food outcome and were then trained to lever press for a different food outcome. We found that the Pavlovian stimulus enhanced performance of the lever press response and that this enhancement was preserved after extinction of that stimulus (Experiment 1) even when the context was manipulated to favor the expression of extinction (Experiment 2). Next, we assessed whether extinction influenced the excitatory effect of a stimulus when it was trained as a discriminative stimulus. Extinction of this stimulus alone had no effect on its ability to control instrumental performance; however, when extinguished with its associated lever press response, discriminative control was lost (Experiments 3 and 4). Finally, after instrumental and Pavlovian training, we extinguished a Pavlovian stimulus predicting one food outcome with a lever press response that delivered a different outcome. In a general PIT test, we found this extinction abolished the ability of the Pavlovian stimulus to elevate responding on a lever trained with a different outcome, revealing for the first time that extinction can abolish the general PIT effect. We conclude that extinction can produce an inhibitory association between the stimulus and the general response type, whether Pavlovian or instrumental, performed during the extinction training.

本实验检查了预测食物的刺激的消失是否会影响该刺激激发乐器表演以获得食物的能力。我们首先使用一般的巴甫洛夫仪器转移 (PIT) 范式，其中首先对大鼠进行巴甫洛夫条件反射，刺激预测一种食物结果，然后训练它们杠杆压力以获得不同的食物结果。我们发现巴甫洛夫刺激增强了杠杆按压响应的性能，并且这种增强在该刺激消失后得以保留（实验 1），即使当环境被操纵以有利于消退的表达时（实验 2）。接下来，我们评估了在将刺激训练为区分刺激时，消退是否会影响刺激的兴奋效应。仅此刺激的消失对其控制乐器演奏的能力没有影响；然而，当其相关的杠杆按压响应熄灭时，判别控制失去了（实验 3 和 4）。最后，在器乐训练和巴甫洛夫式训练之后，我们消除了预测一种食物结果的巴甫洛夫式刺激，而杠杆按压反应提供了不同的结果。在一般 PIT 测试中，我们发现这种消退消除了巴甫洛夫刺激提高对不同结果训练的杠杆的反应的能力，这首次揭示了消退可以消除一般 PIT 效应。我们得出结论，在消退训练期间，消退可以在刺激和一般反应类型（无论是巴甫洛夫式还是器乐式）之间产生抑制性关联。