Resistance to extinction versus extinction as discrimination
Teach clients to spot when reinforcement is gone and extinction works faster.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bell et al. (2021) ran lab tests with pigeons. The birds pecked keys on two schedules.
One schedule always gave food. The other never gave food. The team watched how long pecking lasted when food stopped.
What they found
Pecking stopped faster when birds could tell the food and no-food periods apart.
The old idea that rich reinforcement makes behavior stubborn was not the full story. Discrimination mattered more.
How this fits with other research
Reynolds (1968) saw the opposite: keeping food in one slot made pecking in the other slot harder to stop. Bell trained clear food vs no-food signals and the effect flipped.
McIntyre et al. (2002) and Craig et al. (2019) still support momentum theory, but only when the animals could not tell the contexts apart.
Bell’s work does not kill momentum. It adds a rule: teach the difference between reinforcement and non-reinforcement contexts and extinction gets easier.
Why it matters
Before you start extinction, set up clear signals that reinforcement is gone. Use different rooms, different people, or different cues.
This one step can cut weeks of persistent problem behavior. Try it with your next case.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The hypothesis that response strength might be measured by persistence of responding in the face of extinction was discredited in the 1960s because experiments showed that responding persists longer following intermittent reinforcers than following continuous reinforcers. Instead, researchers proposed that the longer persistence following intermittent reinforcers arises because intermittent reinforcement more closely resembles extinction-a discrimination theory. Attention to resistance to extinction revived because one observation seemed to support the persistence hypothesis: Following training on a multiple schedule with unequal components, responding usually persisted longer in the formerly richer component than in the formerly lean component. This observation represents an anomaly, however, because results with single schedules and concurrent schedules contradict it. We suggest that the difference in results arises because the multiple-schedule procedure, while including extensive training on stimulus discrimination, includes no training on discrimination between food available and food unavailable, whereas comparable single- and concurrent-schedule procedures include such training with repeated extinction. In Experiment 1, we replicated the original result, and in Experiment 2 showed that when the multiple-schedule procedure includes training on food/no-food discrimination, extinction following multiple schedules contradicts behavioral momentum theory and agrees with the discrimination theory and research with single and concurrent schedules.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2021 · doi:10.1002/jeab.688