Forgetting and conditioned suppression: role of a temporal discrimination.

Boren et al. (1970) worked with lab rats. The rats first learned to press a lever for food.

A tone sounded for three minutes. Near the end of the tone the rats got a mild foot-shock. Soon they stopped pressing whenever the tone started.

After 25 days off, the rats came back. The team played the tone again to see what the animals remembered.

The rats still froze during the tone. General fear stayed.

But they no longer froze hardest near the shock moment. The fine timing inside the signal was gone.

In plain words, the rats kept the memory yet lost the clock.

Sachs et al. (1969) showed the opposite pattern in humans the year before. People kept sharp timing even after many trials. The clash looks real, but species and procedure differ.

Arantes et al. (2011) later showed that errorless teaching keeps timing safe across short gaps. Their pigeons held the rule better than birds taught by trial and error.

Skrtic et al. (1982) tracked pigeons across seconds, not weeks. Their data line up with the rat curve: the longer the wait, the weaker the cue control. Together the papers sketch one big forgetting slope from seconds to days.

If you use warning cues with clients, plan for retraining after long breaks. A red card may still stop problem behavior, but the subtle "two-minutes-left" cue inside that card will fade. Refresh the timing early instead of assuming it will stick.