Hierarchical resurgence
The most recently taught response resurges first after extinction, so sequence your teaching plans with care.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lattal and colleagues worked with pigeons in a lab.
They first taught one key-peck response for food.
Then they taught a second key-peck response.
Finally they stopped all rewards and watched which response came back first.
What they found
The last response they taught always returned first.
The earlier response returned later.
This order held across three small experiments.
The birds showed a clear last-in, first-out pattern.
How this fits with other research
Fontes et al. (2018) also saw resurgence, but they used punishment instead of extra training.
Both studies prove that behavior comes back when conditions change; the trigger differs.
Green et al. (1986) looked at spontaneous recovery after a break, not after new training.
Their mixed results fit here: without added training, the simple return order is less clear.
Why it matters
When you stack new skills on old ones, plan for the newest skill to reappear first if reinforcement stops.
Fade rewards slowly or teach a replacement response last so it becomes the one that pops back.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →If you must extinguish a behavior chain, note which response was taught last and watch it return first.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
In resurgence, conventionally a target response is trained and then extinguished while some alternative response is reinforced. In the most common procedure, when the latter is extinguished, the former resurges. The present experiments examined resurgence after two responses were trained sequentially and subsequently extinguished. In Experiments 1 and 2, keypecking to one key was trained and then extinguished as keypecking to a different key was trained then later extinguished. In both experiments, regardless of the spatial location of the different keys, the last-trained response resurged before the first-trained one. The results were replicated in Experiment 3 where reinforcement rate of the first-trained response was four times that of the second-trained response. The results in conjunction with earlier experiments suggest that resurgence occurs hierarchically, although whether more or less recently trained target responses resurge first or later may depend on both current and historical variables. The results also raise questions about the interpretation of responding on a control key that sometimes is included in resurgence experiments to isolate resurgence from extinction-induced responding.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2019 · doi:10.1002/jeab.547