Motivational factors underlying aversive Pavlovian-instrumental transfer.

While interest in active avoidance has recently been resurgent, many concerns relating to the nature of this form of learning remain unresolved. By separating stimulus and response acquisition, aversive Pavlovian-instrumental transfer can be used to measure the effect of avoidance learning on threat processing with more control than typical avoidance procedures. However, the motivational substrates that contribute to the aversive transfer effect have not been thoroughly examined.

Novelty-facilitated extinction: providing a novel outcome in place of an expected threat diminishes recovery of defensive responses.

Background: Experimental extinction serves as a model for psychiatric treatments based on associative learning. However, the effects of extinction are often transient, as evidenced by postextinction return of defensive behaviors. From a therapeutic perspective, an inherent problem with extinction may be that mere omission of threat is not sufficient to reduce future threat uncertainty.