The control response in assessing resurgence: Useful or compromised tool?
The control operandum gives muddy resurgence data; swap it for pre-resurgence tests or dual-response designs.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lattal et al. (2020) looked at every resurgence paper that used a control operandum. They asked: does that extra lever really tell us if relapse is caused by extinction?
The authors compared how humans and animals use the control. They also checked if the control lever itself changes behavior.
What they found
The control operandum is broken. People press it even when it never pays off. That makes the data hard to read.
The review says: drop the control lever. Use two new checks instead. Test before resurgence or compare two active responses.
How this fits with other research
Kestner et al. (2018) saw the same crack. They showed resurgence shrinks on the second extinction round. That order effect makes within-subject control data shaky.
Greer et al. (2019) gave a fix. Their Resurgence-as-Choice model says relapse is a choice. If the old response looks better, it comes back. The broken lever can't measure that choice.
Podlesnik et al. (2023) mapped 200 basic studies. Most still cling to the control lever. The 2020 paper tells them to stop.
Why it matters
If you run resurgence probes, skip the extra lever. Run a short pre-test before you start extinction. Or teach two new skills and watch which one returns. Cleaner data means clearer decisions about when relapse is real and when it is just an artifact.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Resurgence experiments sometimes include an operandum on which a history of reinforcement has not been experimentally established. The purpose of this control operandum is to rule out a generalized increase in responding when the alternative response is extinguished as being the cause of the resurgent target response. A review of the results of experiments conducted with both nonhumans and humans in which a control operandum was included shows that control- operandum responding is more common in the latter and almost nonexistent in the former. Both the presence and absence of responding on the control operandum, however, are subject to multiple interpretations thereby rendering it a compromised tool. Alternatives to using a control operandum to rule out extinction induction as the basis for resurgence include a preresurgence test control procedure and a differential resurgence procedure.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2020 · doi:10.1002/jeab.570