Resurgence refers to an increase in a previously suppressed target behavior with a relative worsening of conditions for a more recently reinforced alternative behavior. This experiment examined the relation between resurgence and the magnitude of a reduction in the rate of reinforcement for the alternative behavior. Groups of both male and female rats initially pressed a target lever for food on a variable‐interval (VI) 30‐s schedule. In a second phase, responding to the target lever was extinguished for all groups and pressing an alternative lever was reinforced on a VI 10‐s schedule. Next, the rate of reinforcement for alternative behavior was reduced differentially across groups by arranging extinction, VI 80‐s, VI 40‐s, VI 20‐s, or continued VI 10‐s reinforcement. Target responding increased as an exponential function of the magnitude of the reduction in alternative reinforcement rates. With the exception that males appeared to show higher rates of target responding in baseline and higher rates of alternative responding in other phases, the overall pattern of responding across phases was not meaningfully different between sexes. The pattern of both target and alternative response rates across sessions and phases was well described quantitatively by the Resurgence as Choice in Context model.

Despite widespread belief in the extinction burst as a common occurrence, relatively little empirical work has focused directly on the phenomenon. In order to provide additional data on the topic, we report reanalyses of published extinction‐control groups from our laboratory following training with a variety of schedules and reinforcers. In addition, two prospective experiments were conducted in which rats responded for food on FR 5 or FR 1 schedules prior to a within‐session transition to extinction. The results of these reanalyses and experiments suggest that the obtained prevalence of the extinction burst was considerably greater when response rates in the first minute of the transition to extinction were considered as compared to when session‐wide response rates were considered. In addition, when reinforcement time was included in baseline response‐rate calculations, the obtained prevalence of the extinction burst was higher than when reinforcement time was omitted. These findings highlight the importance of measurement and definitional issues in the obtained prevalence of the extinction burst. Further, a closer alignment of such issues across basic and applied research would be desirable in terms of the development of future theories describing the processes giving rise to the extinction burst.

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Resurgence of previously reinforced behavior represents a challenge to otherwise successful interventions based on differential reinforcement of alternative behavior (DRA). Expanded‐operant treatments seek to increase the number of functional alternative behaviors through DRA, thereby potentially mitigating resurgence. However, the few studies that have directly examined these methods as a tool for resurgence mitigation have provided limited and unclear results. Thus, the present experiments were designed to investigate the effect of expanded‐operant DRA methods on resurgence of previously reinforced behavior using rat subjects. In two experiments, following a baseline phase in which a target response was trained, groups of rats experienced concurrent (i.e., five simultaneous alternative responses), serial (i.e., five sequentially available alternative responses), or single DRA interventions arranging similar rates of alternative reinforcement in order to examine potential differences in resurgence. Both experiments showed that neither serial nor concurrent DRA expanded‐operant treatments reduced resurgence compared with single DRA regardless of whether stimuli associated with previously reinforced alternative responses were removed (Experiment 1) or remained present (Experiment 2) for the serial‐DRA group. Further, a primacy effect in resurgence was obtained for the serial‐DRA group in both experiments. Overall, these results suggest that expanded‐operant treatments may not help to reduce resurgence.