Remote effects of aversive contingencies: Disruption of appetitive behavior by adjacent avoidance sessions.

McIntire et al. (1987) ran appetitive fixed-interval sessions before and after daily shock-avoidance sessions. They wanted to see if the aversive procedure would spill over and change the friendly food-reinforcement task.

The animals earned food on an FI schedule in morning and afternoon blocks. Between those blocks they could postpone shocks by pressing a lever. No shocks ever happened during the food sessions.

Responding for food dropped both before and after the avoidance block. The slowdown lasted for days even after the shock sessions stopped.

Food reinforcement rate stayed the same, so the drop was not because the payoff changed. The avoidance history alone suppressed the appetitive behavior.

Dardano (1971) showed monkeys could keep avoidance and appetitive responding separate when clear cues marked shock risk. D et al. extend that work by showing temporal adjacency, not cue confusion, can still disrupt the appetitive side.

Zimmerman (1969) found that shock delivered on an FI schedule can actually reinforce positively accelerated responding. D et al. flip the coin: shock avoidance outside the FI window suppresses that same pattern. Same schedule, opposite outcome, because the shock role changed from reinforcer to remote stressor.

Snapper et al. (1969) saw response-independent shock hurt temporal discrimination within the same session. D et al. push the effect further, showing the hurt can linger across days and sit outside the shock context entirely.

If you run both DTT and escape extinction in the same morning, the aversive part can quietly depress skill-acquisition rates before and after. Schedule a pure reinforcement activity or a break between high-stress and learning tasks. Watch data for dips that outlast the aversive procedure; they may be lingering side effects, not skill deficits.