Renewal Effect (Conditioning)

The renewal effect is the recovery of a previously extinguished conditioned response when the conditioned stimulus is presented outside the specific context in which extinction training took place. Because a return to the original training context, or a shift to a new context altogether, can bring the extinguished response back, researchers such as Mark Bouton have argued that extinction does not erase the earlier learned association but instead adds a new, more context-dependent memory on top of it. The effect is used to explain relapse after exposure-based treatments for phobias and anxiety, since a problem behavior that appeared resolved in a clinical setting can reappear once the person leaves that setting, and it has led to proposals such as conducting extinction training across multiple contexts to make treatment gains more durable.