While fear generalizes widely, extinction is stimulus-specific. Using a hybrid conditioning/episodic memory paradigm, subjects encoded nonrepeating category exemplars during fear conditioning and extinction. Twenty-four hours later, a surprise memory test included old, similar, and novel category exemplars. Results showed strong dissociation between pattern completion (generalization) and pattern separation (discrimination) in episodic memory for items encoded during fear conditioning versus extinction, respectively. These data suggest that directly threat-conditioned stimuli are better recognized at the expense of mnemonic precision, whereas discrimination is enhanced for extinguished stimuli. Overly precise extinction memory may be a contributing factor to fear relapse.

中文翻译：

---

恐惧消退记忆的模式分离

虽然恐惧普遍存在，但灭绝却是针对特定刺激的。使用混合条件反射/情景记忆范式，受试者在恐惧条件反射和消退过程中编码非重复类别范例。二十四小时后，进行了一项令人惊讶的记忆测试，其中包括旧的、相似的和新颖的类别范例。结果显示，情景记忆中的模式完成（泛化）和模式分离（辨别）之间存在强烈的分离，分别是在恐惧条件反射和恐惧消退过程中编码的项目。这些数据表明，直接以威胁为条件的刺激可以被更好地识别，但会牺牲助记精度，而对消失的刺激的辨别力则得到增强。过于精确的消退记忆可能是恐惧复发的一个因素。