Is context nothing more than "a backdrop where learning occurs?" In learning theory there is an ongoing debate about what constitutes a context. This implies a strict division between stimuli that act as cues and those that act as context. In extinction learning, a highly context-sensitive learning process, after the cessation of a behavior, its reappearance as renewal occurs after the change of context. In this study, we tested the ability of competing stimuli to act as context in an appetitive extinction learning paradigm in pigeons (Columba livia) . The ability of each stimulus to act as a context, was assessed by the number of resulting renewal responses. In contrast to commonly held definitions of context, stimulus contiguity had the biggest effect on renewal. Decreasing stimulus contiguity effectively suspended context-based renewal. Furthermore, stimulus repetition across sessions due to repeated exposure to extinction, reduced the animals' renewal. In conclusion, context appears to arise from a set of available stimuli, following associative learning properties. Our results, shed light on why many types of stimuli can act as a context and generate renewal, challenging passive definitions of context as 'a backdrop where learning occurs', as well as the division between cues and context. Instead, context appears to be the result of an active effort to disambiguate information in the environment.