Backward conditioning: Mediation by the context

The information acquired in backward conditioning (i.e., outcome --> cue) was assessed in 3 Pavlovian lick-suppression experiments with water-deprived rats as subjects. Experiment 1 confirmed previous research that few outcome --> cue pairings made the cue into a conditioned excitor and additionally. showed that massive posttraining extinction of the training context attenuated a backward-trained cue's excitatory value. Experiment 2 found that many outcome --> cue pairings made the cue into a conditioned inhibitor and that the same context manipulation attenuated this inhibitory value. Experiment 3 confirmed the observations of Experiments I and 2 and demonstrated that these effects of context extinction were specific to backward-trained cues conditioned in the extinguished context. These results are interpreted in terms of cue --> context and context --> outcome associations.