Resurgence and repeated within‐session progressive‐interval thinning of alternative reinforcement
Thinning alternative reinforcement too fast sparks resurgence, but cutting the last bit off doesn’t make it worse—low rate is the real culprit.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Nist and team worked with neurotypical adults in a lab.
They taught a simple button-press for candy.
Then they added a new button that paid better.
Next they thinned the new pay using short progressive-interval schedules inside each session.
They watched if the old button came back when pay got lean.
What they found
Resurgence showed up every time the new pay dropped fast.
Taking the last bit of pay away later did not make the old button press more.
Low overall rate of reinforcement, not its complete removal, drove the relapse.
How this fits with other research
Greer et al. (2024) tested the same idea with children who hit or bit.
They found big early drops in reinforcement caused the worst resurgence.
This extends Nist’s lab result2021 finding into real clinical cases.
Arroyo Antúnez et al. (2026) used mice and varied treat size instead of rate.
Bigger treats knocked out the target faster but bounced back harder.
This conceptually replicates Nist’s rate effect across species.
Fisher et al. (2019) showed richer baseline reinforcement raised later relapse.
Nist’s 2021 study refines this under tight lab control, confirming rate as the key lever.
Kestner et al. (2018) warned resurgence weakens on second extinction.
Nist’s repeated within-session cycles did not show this fade, likely because thinning kept some reinforcement present.
Why it matters
When you thin alternative reinforcement, cut the rate slowly.
Big early steps invite relapse.
Keep some reinforcement flowing instead of jumping to zero.
This protects the gains you made with FCT or DRA.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Resurgence of a previously suppressed target behavior is common when reinforcement for a more recently reinforced alternative behavior is thinned. To better characterize such resurgence, these experiments examined repeated within-session alternative reinforcement thinning using a progressive-interval (PI) schedule with rats. In Experiment 1, a transition from a high rate of alternative reinforcement to a within-session PI schedule generated robust resurgence, but subsequent complete removal of alternative reinforcement produced no additional resurgence. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and showed similar effects with a fixed-interval (FI) schedule arranging similarly reduced session-wide rates of alternative reinforcement. Thus, the lack of additional resurgence following repeated exposure to the PI schedule was likely due to the low overall obtained rate of alternative reinforcement provided by the PI schedule, rather than to exposure to within-session reinforcement thinning per se. In both experiments, target responding increased at some point in the session during schedule thinning and continued across the rest of the session. Rats exposed to a PI schedule showed resurgence later in the session and after more cumulative alternative reinforcers than those exposed to an FI schedule. The results suggest the potential importance of further exploring how timing and change-detection mechanisms might be involved in resurgence.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2021 · doi:10.1002/jeab.672