Source
Craske, Treanor, Conway, Zbozinek & Vervliet, LIT-1500, read in full in NOTE-1137 from the NIH author manuscript (PMC4114726): the sections “Inhibitory Learning Model of Extinction” and “Reconsolidation”.
What was actually shown
Nothing new. The paper states the model and its evidence: “the original CS-US association learned during fear conditioning is not erased during extinction, but rather is left intact as new, secondary inhibitory learning about the CS-US develops”. After extinction the CS “possesses two meanings”. Four procedures uncover the original meaning: spontaneous recovery (time), renewal (context change), reinstatement (unsignalled US) and rapid reacquisition (re-pairing). Each is cited to animal and human studies. The authors note that “additional mechanisms, such as habituation, are likely to be involved”. They also note that reconsolidation results, which might suggest erasure, “may relate more to enhancing the retrieval of the extinction learning rather than erasing acquisition learning”.
What could have come out otherwise: extinguished fear could have stayed gone under all four procedures, as an unlearning account predicts.
What this does not say
- That exposure therapy works only this way. Exposure is “the clinical proxy of extinction”; the translation is the paper’s proposal.
- That the original association can never be erased. The reconsolidation evidence is described as open.
- That anxious patients’ fear is a conditioned association. That fear conditioning is a valid model of the disorders is assumed, with one citation.
Connections
- CLAIM-446. It gives a mechanism for persistence that the claim does not name: an old expectancy that survives correction and competes for retrieval. A governance account of persistence must say what it adds to this one.
Note of 2026-10-29: what holds it back
The source is a clinical translation that names the four return-of-fear procedures and cites their evidence without reporting it. Neither Bouton’s reviews nor a later systematic review of spontaneous recovery, renewal, reinstatement and rapid reacquisition has been read, and the reconsolidation evidence that would weaken the account is, by the source’s own description, open. CLAIM-446 cites this account only as a rival, so a split into what Craske et al. state would free nothing.