It is expected that discriminate extinction training will abolish the PIT effect produced by the beer stimulus, suggesting generalisation of the S R1-no O1 rule to the new beer reS R1-no S:R3-nO1O1.
Separate analyses will be run for treated stimuli, to document treatment and maintenance effects, and untreated stimuli, to document generalisation of treatment effects and their maintenance.
Thus physical similarity to rewarding stimuli may produce false aversive responses, possibly through response generalisation to rewarding stimuli.
The initial, stereotyped activation constitutes a pre-identification, higher order temporal TD error response, or possibly response generalisation to rewarding stimuli or contexts.
The most compelling future direction for this research, therefore, would be to determine whether discriminative extinction training conducted with multiple stimuli, responses and contexts, would enhance generalisation to novel experimental configurations.
However, it is not known whether degrading context specificity in this way would enhance the generalisation of extinction learning to equivalent stimuli and responses, either retroactively or proactively.
The second challenge is to enhance the generalisation of extinction learning to other equivalent stimuli and responses.
However, a better understanding of how to enhance the generalisation of discriminative extinction learning to other stimuli, responses and internal/external contexts is required to realise the therapeutic potential of this technique.
In particular, the ability to categorise together a range of different stimuli, which is often the basis for studying 'concepts' in non-linguistic animals, is consistent with such generalisation behaviour being mediated by propositional structure or by non-conceptual representations.
It was expected that the beer stimulus would show reduced capacity to elicit the beer response (R3) in the extinguished group (Fig. 3B) demonstrating generalisation of a discriminative extinction rule, S R1-no O1, to a new reS R1-no S:R3-nO1O1.
While that study did not assess face or body masculinity per se, it seems to be in contrast to our findings using photographic stimuli and warrants further investigation of masculinity in video clips and dominance in photographs to help elucidate the generalisation of these findings to other media.
