Resistance to change and the law of effect.
Quick extinction tests can overestimate how persistent a skill is, especially after you change the reinforcement rule.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team ran pigeons on two-key multiple schedules.
They varied reinforcer size in one test and reinforcer rate in another.
Then they gave free food to see which key pecks kept going.
They wanted to know if bigger or more frequent rewards make behavior stick.
What they found
Big food pellets kept pecking strong during free food.
Changing how often food came did not change staying power.
The pattern only showed up when food no longer required pecking.
The authors say extinction probes may trick us about true staying power.
How this fits with other research
Cox et al. (2015) later showed momentum needs many stable sessions.
That finding helps explain why N et al. saw messy results after short swaps.
Bell et al. (2021) went further: they taught birds to tell reinforcement from non-reinforcement contexts.
When the birds could tell the difference, extinction dropped fast, even after rich histories.
This looks like a clash, but both papers agree on one point: extinction alone is a shaky ruler for measuring momentum.
N et al. warned us first; Bell showed how to fix the ruler.
Why it matters
If you plan to fade reinforcement, do not trust one quick extinction probe.
Run several steady sessions first, then test across days as R et al. advise.
Add clear signals that tell the learner reinforcement is now off, like Bell did.
This combo gives you a safer picture of how strong the behavior really is.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Before you call a behavior solid, run at least three stable reinforcement sessions, then probe extinction twice and average the results.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Three experiments using multiple schedules of reinforcement explored the implications of resistance-to-change findings for the response-reinforcer relation described by the law of effect, using both steady-state responding and responding recorded in the first few sessions of conditions. In Experiment 1, when response-independent reinforcement was increased during a third component, response rate in Components 1 and 2 decreased. This response-rate reduction was proportionately greater in a component in which reinforcer magnitude was small (2-s access to wheat) than in the component in which it was large (6-s access to wheat). However, when reinforcer rates in the two components were varied together in Experiments 2 and 3, response-rate change was the same regardless of the magnitude of reinforcers used in the two components, so that sensitivity of response rates to reinforcer rates (Experiment 2) and of response-rate ratios to reinforcer-rate ratios (Experiment 3) was unaffected by the magnitude of the reinforcers. Therefore, the principles determining resistance to change, described by behavioral momentum theory, seem not to apply when the source of behavior change is the variation of reinforcement contingencies that maintain the behavior. The use of extinction as a manipulation to study resistance to change is questioned.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1992 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1992.57-317