Spontaneous recovery without interference: Why remembering is adaptive

Spontaneous recovery from extinction is a reliable result of two ingredients, variable training outcomes and the passage of time. Accounts of the phenomenon, which have come to focus on interference at the level of memory retrieval, have been based on simple associative learning tasks. The present study was designed to determine whether a more complex task—one requiring spatial mapping, timing, and patch assessment—would be subject to spontaneous recovery. Results showed that spontaneous recovery (1) makes a robust appearance in such tasks, (2) does not require interference among conflicting memories, but instead (3) requires ready access to training memories, and (4) is closely modeled by the temporal weighting rule, a quantitative model of patch choice that prescribes how value is best assigned to variable resources (L. D. Devenport & J. A. Devenport, 1994).

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