The control of switching into blackout during extinction.
During extinction, animals work to produce blackout if it is available—remove the blackout contingency to cut the extra response.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Scientists watched pigeons during extinction. The birds could peck a key that turned the lights off for a few seconds.
The team removed that blackout option in later tests. They also tried changing the room lights or the time between food times.
They wanted to know if the blackout itself kept the extra pecking alive.
What they found
When blackout still followed the peck, the birds kept hitting the key. Once blackout was gone, the pecking stopped.
Changing the room brightness or the schedule had almost no effect. The short dark period was the real payoff.
How this fits with other research
Crane et al. (2008) later showed the same rule in people. After they extinguished the strongest cue, weaker cues suddenly guided choices again. Both studies say: remove the payoff and the side behavior drops.
Matson et al. (2013) tested stereotypy in children. Adding extra praise for the stereotypy did not help extinction, just as keeping blackout did not help the pigeons. The message across species: do not feed the extra response.
Falligant et al. (2020) used response-interruption plus timed access to toys. Their tactic worked, yet the core idea matches the 1975 paper—cut the reinforcer that keeps the extra response going.
Why it matters
If a client keeps flipping a switch, tapping a screen, or rocking during downtime, ask what that action produces. A dark room, a buzz, or even a brief escape can be the hidden payoff. Remove that tiny consequence first. You will often see the extra behavior fade without any other tricks.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
During the extinction component of a multiple variable-interval extinction schedule, four pigeons learned to peck a second key that switched off the keylights. Two experiments attempted to isolate the events that control this behavior. In the first experiment, switching into blackout was equally maintained when switches were restricted to the first minute as when they were restricted to the last minute of the extinction component. When switches could be emitted in the first and last minutes, they occurred more frequently in the first. Restricting switching to the first minute of each component and eliminating the blackout between components had no effect on switching. In the second experiment, when the stimulus correlated with extinction was omitted, switching decreased slightly. Omission of both multiple schedule stimuli decreased the switching rate, but switching was still maintained. Food reinforcement was then omitted and switching by two birds increased. Switching ceased when blackout was no longer the consequence of pecking the switching key. It was concluded that switching was not controlled by the similarity of the blackouts produced by the switching key and those that occurred between components; nor was it maintained by the temporal proximity of switching responses to the onset of the reinforced component. Finally, switching did not appear to be controlled by the main-key stimuli correlated with the components of the multiple schedule.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1975 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1975.23-131