Renewed behavior produced by context change and its implications for treatment maintenance: A review
Treatment works in the clinic, but the behavior may restart at home—test in new places and plan booster extinction.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Podlesnik et al. (2017) wrote a story-style review. They pulled together animal and human studies about renewal.
Renewal means a behavior comes back when the place, people, or cues change. The paper shows how this matters after treatment ends.
What they found
The review says most treatment gains stick only to the training room. When clients go home, the old behavior can pop back up.
The authors give checklists to test for this bounce-back and ways to make skills travel better.
How this fits with other research
King et al. (2025) later counted seven lab tests and agreed: relapse is real, and the type of reward matters.
Kimball et al. (2025) went one step further. They mixed renewal with small accidental rewards and saw a bigger return of the old behavior.
Thrailkill et al. (2018) looked at the same puzzle from the front end. They showed that giving lots of rewards during teaching can plant the seeds for a larger later crash.
Together the picture is clear: both how you teach and what happens after teaching shape the risk of relapse.
Why it matters
You can add a five-minute probe in the home or school setting before you close a case. Watch if the old behavior returns. If it does, run a brief booster extinction session right there, then thin your schedule. This simple step can save you from a surprise phone call next month.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Behavioral treatment gains established in one setting do not always maintain in other settings. The present review examines the relevance of basic and translational research to understanding failures to maintain treatment gains across settings. Specifically, studies of the renewal effect examine how transitioning away from a treatment setting could evoke a return of undesirable behavior, rather than newly trained appropriate behavior. Studies of renewal typically arrange three phases, with a response trained and reinforced under a particular set of contextual stimuli in the first phase. Next, that response is extinguished, often under a different set of contextual stimuli. Finally, that response returns despite extinction remaining in effect upon returning to the original training context or transitioning to a novel context. Thus, removing the extinction context is sufficient to produce a recurrence of the response. The findings suggest treatment effects can become specific to the context in which the treatment was delivered. This literature offers promising methods for systematically assessing the factors contributing to treatment maintenance and improving generalization of treatment gains across contexts. Therefore, the present review suggests basic and translational research on renewal provides an empirical literature to bring greater conceptual systematization to understanding generalization and maintenance of behavioral treatment.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2017 · doi:10.1002/jaba.400