Effects of reinforcer type on the durability of treatment for escape‐maintained behavior
Tokens can take over from food during schedule thinning, but escape breaks alone will likely fail.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bonner et al. (2022) compared three reinforcers during schedule thinning for escape-maintained problem behavior.
They tested tokens, food, and escape breaks with three children who had intellectual or developmental disabilities.
An alternating-treatments design let each reinforcer face the same thinning steps.
What they found
Tokens kept problem behavior low for two of the three kids.
Food worked just as well as tokens for the same two.
Escape breaks alone either failed from the start or fell apart during thinning for every child.
How this fits with other research
Carter (2010), Au-Yeung et al. (2015), and Kahng et al. (1999) all showed that edible or leisure items beat escape breaks without needing extinction.
Bonner’s mixed results line up with Briggs et al. (2019), who also found you must boost reinforcer quality or size to keep gains while thinning.
Slocum et al. (2025) later added escape extinction and still saw positive reinforcement win—showing the pattern holds even when you add extinction.
Why it matters
If you are thinning schedules for escape-maintained behavior, lean on tokens or edibles and treat escape only as a backup.
Check the data early; if problem behavior creeps up, swap in a stronger positive reinforcer before the schedule thins further.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
AbstractIn the absence of escape extinction, evidence suggests that positive reinforcement may decrease escape‐maintained behavior. A variety of reinforcers (e.g., food, tokens, and escape) have been used to strengthen alternative behavior in prior research. But, the differential effects of these reinforcers on an intervention's capacity to maintain low rates of problem behavior in the absence of escape extinction during schedule thinning remains unknown. The current study evaluated whether interventions incorporating the use of tokens would equal the effects (in terms of the intervention's capacity to maintain low rates of problem behavior during schedule thinning) of interventions that incorporated escape or food. Results showed that for two of three participants diagnosed with intellectual and developmental disabilities, token reinforcement produced therapeutic effects during schedule thinning. For all participants, the intervention involving negative reinforcement for compliance was either ineffective or deteriorated as the schedule of reinforcement was thinned.
Behavioral Interventions, 2022 · doi:10.1002/bin.1876