Retroactive interference: Counterconditioning and extinction with and without biologically significant outcomes

Following cue-outcome (X-O) pairings, 2 procedures that reduce conditioned responses to X are extinction, in which X is presented by itself, and counterconditioning, in which X is paired with a different outcome typically of valence opposite that of training. Although studies with animals have generally found counterconditioning more efficient than extinction in reducing responding, data from humans are less clear. They suggest counterconditioning is more efficient than extinction at interfering with emotional processing, but there is little difference between the two procedures regarding their impact on the verbal assessment of the probability of the outcome given the cue. However, issues of statistical power leave conclusions ambiguous. We compared counterconditioning and extinction in highly powered experiments that exploited a novel procedure. A rapid streamed-trial procedure was used in which participants were asked to rate how likely a target outcome was to accompany a target cue after being exposed to acquisition trials followed by extinction, counterconditioning, or neither. In Experiments 1 and 2, evaluative conditioning was assessed by asking participants to rate the pleasantness of the cues after treatment. These studies found counterconditioning more efficient than extinction at reducing evaluative conditioning but less efficient at decreasing the assessment of the conditional probability of the outcome given the cue. The latter effect was replicated with neutral outcomes in Experiments 3 and 4, but the effect was inverted in Experiment 4 in conditions designed to preclude reinstatement of initial training by the question probing the conditional probability of the outcome given the cue. Effect sizes were small (Cohen's d of 0.2 for effect on evaluative conditioning, Cohen's d of 0.3 for effect on the outcome expectancy). If representative, this poses a serious constraint in terms of statistical power for further investigations of differential efficiency of extinction and counterconditioning in humans.