Renewal and resurgence phenomena generalize to Amazon's Mechanical Turk
Online workers show the same renewal and resurgence as lab subjects, so you can test extinction procedures quickly and cheaply on the web.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Robinson et al. (2020) ran renewal and resurgence tests online. They used Amazon Mechanical Turk workers instead of college students in a lab.
The team wanted to know if classic extinction effects show up when people click for money at home.
What they found
The online group showed the same renewal and resurgence patterns seen in face-to-face labs. Behavior returned when the setting changed or when reinforcement came back.
Cheap, fast data matched expensive lab data.
How this fits with other research
Baruni et al. (2025) and Rapp et al. (2025) also ran single-case extinction tests with neurotypical adults. They saw orderly behavior in a treadmill lab. Robinson’s online method gives the same orderliness without the treadmill.
Bland et al. (2018) tested pigeons in a lab and found steady choice patterns. Robinson shows you can swap birds and cages for humans and laptops and still get clean extinction effects.
Courtemanche et al. (2021) scaled up staff training to big groups. Robinson scales up data collection to the internet. Both keep the science solid while saving time and money.
Why it matters
You can now pilot extinction procedures online before using them with clients. Run a quick MTurk study to see if your renewal setup works. Then move to the clinic with confidence. Faster tests mean better interventions for the people we serve.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing platform that provides researchers with the potential for obtaining behavioral data for very little cost. However, the extent to which the results of common behavioral phenomena found in basic, translational, and applied laboratories may be reproduced (as a first step towards prospective research) via MTurk remains relatively unexplored. We evaluated renewal and resurgence arrangements using MTurk as the subject recruitment platform as a first step to determining the generality of the obtained data. Results suggested that MTurk participants produced renewal and resurgence data similar to those reported in basic, translational, and applied studies.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2020 · doi:10.1002/jeab.576