ArticleCortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior2020
No persistent attenuation of fear memories in humans: A registered replication of the reactivation-extinction effect.
Article in Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 69 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Imagine yourself as a little girl…-efficacy and psychophysiology of imagery techniques targeting adverse autobiographical childhood experiences- multi-arm randomised controlled trial.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Trial
- Preventing fear return in humans: Music-based intervention during reactivation-extinction paradigm.PloS one · 2024Trial
- Trial
- Neurotransmitters in memory destabilization: An integrative perspective framed by prediction error and novelty.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- A ventral striatal learning signal reflecting individual differences in the success of fear extinction.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Negative allosteric modulation of mGlu7 disrupts fear memory reconsolidation and glutamatergic signaling in rat and human brain tissue.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- A systematic review of spontaneous recovery in human fear conditioning.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- Dissociable memory modulation mechanisms facilitate fear amnesia at different timescales.eLife · 2025Article
- Neural evidence for the effects of behavioral memory updating following fear conditioning.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Investigating the effect of continuous and partial reinforcement in conceptual fear generalization.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Conflict Dynamics of Post-Retrieval Extinction: A Comparative Analysis of Unconditional and Conditional Reminders Using Skin Conductance Responses and EEG.Brain topography · 2024Article
- Fear attenuation collaborations to optimize translation.Behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Carbon Dioxide Reactivity Differentially Predicts Fear Expression After Extinction and Retrieval-Extinction in Rats.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2024Article
- Memory persistence: from fundamental mechanisms to translational opportunities.Translational psychiatry · 2024Review
- Appraising reconsolidation theory and its empirical validation.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Review
- Memory retrieval, reconsolidation, and extinction: Exploring the boundary conditions of post-conditioning cue exposure.Frontiers in synaptic neuroscience · 2023Review
- Reconsolidation and Fear Extinction: An Update.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2023Article
- Obliviate! Reviewing Neural Fundamentals of Intentional Forgetting from a Meta-Analytic Perspective.Biomedicines · 2022Review
- Demarcating the boundary conditions of memory reconsolidation: An unsuccessful replication.Scientific reports · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It has been proposed that memory retrieval can destabilize consolidated memories, after which they need to be reconsolidated in order to be retained. The presentation of relevant information during memory reconsolidation could then result in the modification of a destabilized memory trace, by allowing the memory trace to be updated before being reconsolidated. In line with this idea, Schiller et al. (2010) have demonstrated that memory retrieval shortly before extinction training can prevent the later recovery of conditioned fear responding that is observed after regular extinction training. Those findings have been the subject of considerable controversy, due in part to theoretical reasons but also due to a number of failures to obtain similar results in conceptual replication attempts. Here, we report the results of a highly powered, direct, independent replication of the critical conditions of Schiller et al. (2010, Experiment 1). Due to misrepresentation of the exclusion criteria in the original Schiller et al. (2010) report, data collection was considerably delayed. When we eventually managed to attain our pre-registered sample size, we found that we could not observe any benefit of reactivation-extinction over regular extinction training in preventing recovery of conditioned fear. The results of the present study, along with the mixed findings in the literature and the misreporting in Schiller et al. (2010), give cause to question whether there is robust evidence that reactivation-extinction prevents the return of fear in humans.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.