Extinction of a discriminative operant following discrimination learning with and without errors.
Thin to intermittent reinforcement before extinction to avoid burst and aggression.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Terrace (1969) taught pigeons to peck only when a colored light was on. The birds learned the color cue through errorless training. Then the team stopped all rewards to see how fast the birds quit pecking.
Some birds got a reward every time they pecked the right color. Others got rewards only now and then. The study asked: does the reward schedule change how the birds act when rewards stop?
What they found
Birds that got every-peck rewards fell apart fast. They pecked wildly, then stopped. Birds on the sometimes-reward schedule kept steady pecking longer and showed less upset.
In short, intermittent reinforcement during teaching protected the birds from the shock of extinction.
How this fits with other research
Jenkins et al. (1973) and Harrison et al. (1975) used the same setup and saw a new side effect: birds that got rich rewards later attacked the cage when rewards stopped. Lean schedules cut this aggression.
Capio et al. (2013) repeated the core finding with children with autism. Problem behavior faded faster when it had been on a thin schedule first. The animal rule holds for people.
KELLEHER et al. (1963) showed earlier that lots of continuous rewards make bigger extinction bursts. Terrace (1969) adds the fix: switch to intermittent before you pull the plug.
Why it matters
Before you place a skill on extinction, thin the reinforcement schedule. Move from every correct response to every third, then every fifth. This small shift cuts burst size, lowers aggression, and keeps the learner calm. Use it when fading token boards, stopping prompt delivery, or reducing edible rewards.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Different groups of pigeons were trained to respond to red and not to green with and without errors (responses to green) under a free operant procedure, in which responding to red was intermittently reinforced, and under a trial procedure in which all responses to red were reinforced. The response to red was then extinguished under a procedure in which the discriminative stimuli were successively alternated as during discrimination training. The performances of those birds that learned the discrimination without errors under the trial procedure were seriously disrupted during extinction; the birds persistently responded to green for the first time. The performances of those subjects that learned the discrimination without errors under the free operant procedure were not disrupted during extinction. In a second experiment, the same discrimination was trained without errors under a trial procedure in which the response to red was intermittently reinforced. Extinction did not disrupt discrimination performance. Thus, errorless discrimination performance was shown to remain intact during extinction so long as the response to red was intermittently reinforced during discrimination training.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1969 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1969.12-571