Be very careful when messing with your System 1. It’s not designed to be reversible. Unlearning is at least 10x harder than learning.
Can you provide evidence for this? It hasn’t been my experience. For example, my understanding is that fears exist in System 1, and I’ve had experiences where I accidentally gave myself fears of things and then subsequently deliberately got over them through exposure therapy etc.
If you believe it, unlearning (extinction) does not remove the old learning, it covers it up with an extra layer of compensatory learning, while the original habits still lurk underneath. Which matches my experience tutoring students who learned a bad technique, or observing people (including myself) who learned a bad habit: even after a lot of effort it is really easy to slip up into them.
I’m not sure your reference is very conclusive on this topic: ‘We argue that the question “is extinction reversal of acquisition or new inhibitory learning?” is therefore not well posed because the answer may depend on factors such as the brain system in question or the level of analysis considered.’ Your personal experiences do make sense to me though. Reminds me of this for some reason.
Can you provide evidence for this? It hasn’t been my experience. For example, my understanding is that fears exist in System 1, and I’ve had experiences where I accidentally gave myself fears of things and then subsequently deliberately got over them through exposure therapy etc.
Well, I tried looking it up, but can’t find much in a pinch, but here is one reference: http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/11/5/566.short
If you believe it, unlearning (extinction) does not remove the old learning, it covers it up with an extra layer of compensatory learning, while the original habits still lurk underneath. Which matches my experience tutoring students who learned a bad technique, or observing people (including myself) who learned a bad habit: even after a lot of effort it is really easy to slip up into them.
I’m not sure your reference is very conclusive on this topic: ‘We argue that the question “is extinction reversal of acquisition or new inhibitory learning?” is therefore not well posed because the answer may depend on factors such as the brain system in question or the level of analysis considered.’ Your personal experiences do make sense to me though. Reminds me of this for some reason.