The saying “context is everything”. Quotes, events, actions, or stimuli, cannot be viewed in isolation. They must be interpreted in the light of a bigger picture – their context. This is also evident in extinction learning where, in contextual renewal, an extinguished response reoccurs if the context is changed.

But what exactly is context? In our study, we assessed how competing stimuli induced contextual renewal during extinction learning in pigeons (Columba livia) using a modified ABA paradigm (see below). Manipulating the timing of stimuli, we found that with the right contiguity, small local stimuli resulted in the strongest contextual renewal.

This result challenges definitions of context as ‘a backdrop where learning occurs’. We rather propose that context can be understood mechanistically as a learned stimulus property.

Press release from Science Magazine: >>

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ABA Paradigm:

A: The pigeons learn stimulus associations under local and global context factors.

B: Extinction of learned associations under new local and global context factors.

A’: In the renewal phase, one of the two possible context stimuli (local/global) is now presented in its original configuration before extinction , while the other stimulus remains as it was during extinction. This “competition” between the different contextual stimuli enables a comparison of the contextual renewal between the different types of contexts.

Experimental Setup:

A Experimental setup. The pigeons were placed in an arena with colorfully illuminated areas and geometric shapes on screens as orientation aids. The animals responded to small touchscreens on the floor and automatically received their rewards there.

B Experimental procedure. After an initial click, the pigeons were shown two choices: a positive signal (S+) and a negative signal (S-). Pecking on the positive signal was rewarded with food pellets, pecking on the negative signal remained unrewarded.

C Learning and extinction procedure. In the first learning phase (context A), the animals were placed in a random location with a white screen background. In the extinction phase (context B), they changed location and screen color (here yellow). In the final test phase, either the original learning location with the new screen color or the new location with the original screen color was used.