An assessment of context-specificity of the CS-preexposure effect in Pavlovian excitatory and inhibitory conditioning

Non-reinforced preexposure to a to-be-conditioned stimulus (CS) results in retarded development of conditioned excitation and inhibition. In a magazine-approach preparation in rats, we explored the role of background context on this CS-preexposure effect by changing contexts after the preexposure treatment. Experiment 1 demonstrated with a typical three-group design that changing background contexts attenuated the CS-preexposure effect in conditioned excitation. Experiment 2 employed the identical design except that conditioned inhibition was the target of study. Preexposure to stimulus X retarded subsequent differentiation of responding to reinforced A trials and non-reinforced AX trials, suggesting that CS-preexposure retarded development of inhibitory conditioning. However, changing contexts did not attenuate the preexposure effect. We discuss these results in the framework of the extended comparator hypothesis.