Savings in animal learning: Implications for relapse and maintenance after therapy

Savings are the proactive influences of prior learning on later learning even when the original behavior has been extinguished or forgotten. Therapists can capitalize on savings both to understand the sources of relapse and to maintain and extend therapeutic outcomes in the client's ordinary environment. This paper reviews recent findings from our laboratory that savings in animal learning are more extensive than previously thought. Not only can responding to an extinguished stimulus reappear spontaneously, but reacquisition of a conditioned response can also occur very rapidly. Moreover, once conditioning has taken place with one stimulus, subsequent acquisition of the same response to a completely novel stimulus will be accelerated. At the same time as this novel acquisition, the response to the original, extinguished stimulus also shows recovery that is distinct from generalization. We propose a neural network model that explains a wide range of savings and therefore illuminates a common mechanism that underpins both relapse and maintenance after therapy.