Assessing the role of alternative response rates and reinforcer rates in resistance to extinction of target responding when combining stimuli
Give rich alternative reinforcement in its own context first, then blend spaces, to cut how long extinction drags on.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Podlesnik and colleagues ran three lab experiments with pigeons. They first taught birds to peck a key for food. Then they added a second key that paid better. The twist: the rich key sat in its own corner of the cage. Later the walls came down and both keys shared the same space.
During extinction no key paid off. The team watched how long the old, now-unpaid pecking kept going.
What they found
When the high-rate alternative had lived in its own spot first, the birds gave up the old key faster once everything was together. Persistence dropped sharply compared with birds that always saw both keys side-by-side.
The separate-then-combined setup weakened extinction resistance.
How this fits with other research
Capio et al. (2013) showed the same trade-off: rich alternative reinforcement knocks target behavior down fast but rebounds hard when you remove it. Podlesnik keeps that pattern and adds the spatial-context trick.
Craig et al. (2017) swapped rate for size—five pellets versus one—and got the same suppress-then-rebound curve. Together the studies say the effect is about value, not just rate.
Johnston et al. (2017) moved the setup to humans pressing buttons. Rich alternatives again won during extinction yet surged back later. The pigeon rule holds across species.
Why it matters
Start your DRA in a separate place. Deliver high-rate tokens, edibles, or praise in the kitchen, play corner, or break room while you extinguish problem behavior in the work area. Only after the new skill is strong do you let both contexts overlap. This small spatial plan can save you days of extinction bursts when the extra reinforcement fades.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Studies of behavioral momentum reveal that reinforcing an alternative response in the presence of a target response reduces the rate of target responding but increases its persistence, relative to training the target response on its own. Because of the parallels between these studies and differential-reinforcement techniques to reduce problem behavior in clinical settings, alternative techniques to reduce problem behavior without enhancing its persistence are being explored. One potential solution is to train an alternative response in a separate stimulus context from problem behavior before combining the alternative stimulus with the target stimulus. The present study assessed how differences in reinforcement contingencies and rate for alternative responding influenced resistance to extinction of target responding when combining alternative and target stimuli in pigeons. Across three experiments, alternative stimuli signaling a response-reinforcer dependency and greater reinforcer rates more effectively decreased the persistence of target responding when combining alternative and target stimuli within the same extinction tests, but not when compared across separate extinction tests. Overall, these findings reveal that differences in competition between alternative and target responding produced by contingencies of alternative reinforcement could influence the effectiveness of treating problem behavior through combining stimulus contexts.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2016 · doi:10.1002/jeab.206