ArticleLearning & behavior2009
Spacing extinction trials alleviates renewal and spontaneous recovery.
Article in Learning & behavior, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers.
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Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed.
- Randomized controlled trial of d-cycloserine in cocaine dependence: Effects on contingency management and cue-induced cocaine craving in a naturalistic setting.Experimental and clinical psychopharmacology · 2020Trial
- Trial
- One-Session Versus Three-Sessions of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Public Speaking Anxiety: Protocol of a Randomized Controlled Trial.JMIR research protocols · 2026Article
- Context-Dependent Extinction and Return of Pavlovian Alcohol-Seeking Behavior in Male and Female Rats.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2026Article
- Memory erasure by dopamine-gated retrospective learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Transcriptomic Architecture of Weak Versus Strong Contextual Fear Extinction Learning Uncovers Extinction-Suppressive Role of TIA1.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2025Article
- Social buffering during fear extinction rescues long-term trauma-induced memory and emotional behavioral alterations in rats.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- The effects of spaced versus massed extinction training on extinction retention of conditioned fear learning in male rats.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Enhancing Associative Learning in Rats With a Computationally Designed Training Protocol.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2024Article
- The Basolateral Amygdala: The Core of a Network for Threat Conditioning, Extinction, and Second-Order Threat Conditioning.Biology · 2023Review
- A model for recovery-from-extinction effects in Pavlovian conditioning and exposure therapy.Learning & behavior · 2023Article
- Benefiting from trial spacing without the cost of prolonged training: Frequency, not duration, of trials with absent stimuli enhances perceived contingency.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2022Article
- Recovery-from-extinction effects in an anuran amphibian: renewal effect, but no reinstatement.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Extinction trial spacing across days differentially impacts fear regulation in adult and adolescent male mice.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2021Article
- Using Extinction-Renewal to Circumvent the Memory Strength Boundary Condition in Fear Memory Reconsolidation.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- The clinical potential of augmented reality.Clinical psychology : a publication of the Division of Clinical Psychology of the American Psychological Association · 2020Article
- A preregistered, direct replication attempt of the retrieval-extinction effect in cued fear conditioning in rats.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2017Article
- Stepping back from 'persistence and relapse' to see the forest: Associative interference.Behavioural processes · 2017Review
- A comparison of behavioral and pharmacological interventions to attenuate reactivated fear memories.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2017Article
- The Spacing Effect for Structural Synaptic Plasticity Provides Specificity and Precision in Plastic Changes.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Studies of extinction in classical conditioning situations can reveal techniques that maximize the effectiveness of exposure-based behavior therapies. In three experiments, we investigated the effect of varying the intertrial interval during an extinction treatment in a fear-conditioning preparation with rats as subjects. In Experiment 1, we found less fear at test (i.e., more effective extinction) when extinction trials were widely spaced, relative to intermediate or massed extinction trials. In Experiment 2, we used an ABA renewal procedure and observed that spaced trials attenuated renewal of conditioned fear relative to massed trials. In Experiment 3, we used a similar design, but instead of changing the physical context at the time of testing, we interposed a retention interval after the extinction treatment to produce a change in the temporal context. The results showed less spontaneous recovery of fear after spaced than after massed extinction trials. These results suggest that extinction is more enduring when the extinction trials are spaced rather than massed. Although the benefits of spacing trials are small when there is no contextual change from extinction to testing, a change in either physical or temporal context following massed extinction trials leads to a recovery from extinction, which is reduced when the trials are spaced.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.