Response rate viewed as engagement bouts: resistance to extinction.
Rich reinforcement histories make behavior harder to stop, so front-load reinforcement before you thin or introduce extinction.
01Research in Context
What this study did
McIntyre et al. (2002) worked with pigeons in a small operant chamber. Birds pecked a key for food on two schedules: rich (VI 30-s) or lean (VI 120-s).
After training, the team stopped all food. They watched how long pecking kept going. They counted every peck and grouped them into bouts.
What they found
Birds with the rich history kept pecking almost twice as long. Their bout-initiation rate also dropped more slowly.
Lean-history birds quit sooner. The result fits behavioral momentum theory: richer reinforcement gives behavior more mass.
How this fits with other research
Craig et al. (2019) later showed that this resistance fades if you repeat extinction probes. Same lab, same birds, but the second and third probe got weaker fast. The papers do not clash; 2002 measured first extinction, 2019 tracked what happens when you test again and again.
Fisher et al. (2018) moved the idea to kids with destructive behavior. They padded the replacement response with dense reinforcement before thinning. Resurgence dropped, echoing the pigeon finding that rich histories fight future extinction.
Pinkston et al. (2018) added extra force requirements to the key. Force did nothing; only reinforcement rate mattered. This null result sharpens the 2002 claim: topography is noise, reinforcement history is signal.
Why it matters
When you plan to fade reinforcement, remember the density the client just felt. A thick schedule leaves behavioral momentum that can outlast your first extinction burst. Build the new skill on an even richer schedule first, then thin slowly. If you must probe extinction later, expect weaker resistance each time you retest; Craig’s data say reassess, don’t trust old numbers.
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Join Free →Before thinning, double the reinforcement rate for the replacement response for two sessions, then thin gradually.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Rats obtained food pellets by nose poking a lighted key, the illumination of which alternated every 50 s during a session between blinking and steady, signaling either a relatively rich (60 per hour) or relatively lean (15 per hour) rate of reinforcement. During one training condition, all the reinforcers in the presence of the rich-reinforcement signal were response dependent (i.e., a variable-interval schedule); during another condition only 25% were response dependent (i.e., a variable-time schedule operated concurrently with a variable-interval schedule). An extinction session followed each training block. For both kinds of training schedule, and consistent with prior results, response rate was more resistant to extinction in the presence of the rich-reinforcement signal than in the presence of the lean-reinforcement signal. Analysis of interresponse-time distributions from baseline showed that differential resistance to extinction was not related to baseline differences in the rate of initiating response bouts or in the length of bouts. Also, bout-initiation rate (like response rate) was most resistant to extinction in the presence of the rich-reinforcement signal. These results support the proposal of behavioral momentum theory (e.g., Nevin & Grace, 2000) that resistance to extinction in the presence of a discriminative stimulus is determined more by the stimulus-reinforcer (Pavlovian) than by the stimulus-response-reinforcer (operant) contingency.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2002 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2002.77-211