Extinction Makes Acquisition Context-Specific in Conditioned Taste Aversion Regardless of the Context Where Acquisition and Testing Take Place

Retrieval of a flavor-illness association has been found to show contextual dependence when the association is learned after a nontarget flavor-illness association has been extinguished in what has been named as the extinction makes acquisition context-specific (EMACS) effect. Four experiments were designed to further explore the EMACS effect in conditioned taste aversion. Experiments 1 and 2 replicated the EMACS effect using rats that did not experience extinction, and rats that underwent extinction of a different flavor as controls. Experiments 3 and 4 found that the experience of extinction with the nontarget Flavor X in a given context (A) led to context-specificity of performance to the target Flavor Y both, when Y was trained in a highly familiar context (B) and tested in the context where X had been trained (Context A, Experiment 3), and when the test was conducted in a less familiar context (C) where no cues or outcomes were presented before (Experiment 4). These results are consistent with the idea that the experience of extinction encourages organism's attention to the contexts, making retrieval of new learning context-specific.