Learning about context is essential for appropriate behavioral strategies, but important contingencies may not arise during initial learning. A variant of contextual fear conditioning, context pre-exposure facilitation, allows us to directly test the relationship between novelty-induced acetylcholine release and later contextual associability. We demonstrate that optogenetically-enhanced acetylcholine during initial contextual exploration leads to stronger fear after subsequent pairing with shock, suggesting that novelty-induced acetylcholine release primes future contextual associations.