Renewal after the extinction of free operant behavior

Abstract

Four experiments were performed to explore the role of context in operant extinction. In all experiments, leverpressing in rats was first reinforced with food pellets on a variable interval 30-s schedule, then extinguished, and finally tested in the same and a different physical context. The experiments demonstrated a clear ABA renewal effect, a recovery of extinguished responding when conditioning, extinction, and testing occurred in contexts A, B, and A, respectively. They also demonstrated ABC renewal (where conditioning extinction and testing occurred in contexts A, B, and C) and, for the first time in operant conditioning, AAB renewal (where conditioning, extinction, and testing occurred in contexts A, A, and B). The latter two phenomena indicate that tests outside the extinction context are sufficient to cause a recovery of extinguished operant behavior and, thus, that operant extinction, like Pavlovian extinction, is relatively specific to the context in which it is learned. AAB renewal was not weakened by tripling the amount of extinction training. ABA renewal was stronger than AAB, but not merely because of context A's direct association with the reinforcer.

Quantitative analysis of local-level resurgence

“…Finally, transitioning to yet another novel Context C while extinction remained in effect produced an increase in responding (i.e., renewal). Relevant to our study, Todd et al found greater increases in responding in Context C when Context B was more distinct from Context C. Although ABC renewal tends to be smaller than ABA renewal (e.g., Bouton et al, 2011;but see Todd, 2013), renewal occurred to a level comparable to that of returning the subjects to the original training Context A (i.e., ABA renewal) when Context B was not explicitly made more distinct. These data are in accord with the results of the present study, where resurgence tended to be more evident following more discriminable transitions from reinforcement to extinction of alternative responding (i.e., signaled vs. unsignaled probes).…”

Effects of the amount of acquisition and contextual generalization on the renewal of instrumental behavior after extinction

“…One question about the data reported by Bouton et al (2011) was the size of the ABC renewal effect. Although statistically robust (e.g., 15 of 16 rats responded more in Context C than in Context B during testing), the increase in the rate of leverpressing from the context of extinction to the test context was not especially large numerically, and clearly was not as large as in ABA renewal.…”

“…A recent series of experiment by Bouton, Todd, Vurbic, and Winterbauer (2011) demonstrated three forms of renewal following instrumental extinction. In one experiment, renewal of instrumental responding occurred when extinction took place in Context B and testing occurred in Context A (ABA renewal).…”

“…Although statistically robust (e.g., 15 of 16 rats responded more in Context C than in Context B during testing), the increase in the rate of leverpressing from the context of extinction to the test context was not especially large numerically, and clearly was not as large as in ABA renewal. However, it is worth noting that the Bouton et al (2011) experiments involved a very modest amount of acquisition training (only five or six 30-min sessions). The aim of the present experiments was thus to further compare ABA and ABC renewal and to examine variables that might influence their magnitudes.…”

The informational value of contexts affects context-dependent learning

“…Furthermore, the renewal effect can occur in situations in which acquisition, extinction, and testing all take place in different contexts (ABC renewal; e.g., Bouton & Bolles, 1979) or in which the context changes only between extinction and testing (AAB renewal; e.g., Bouton & Ricker, 1994). Renewal can be found in many different preparations, including autoshaping with pigeons (Swartzentruber, 1993), human predictive learning (Üngör & Lachnit, 2006(Üngör & Lachnit, , 2008, and operant conditioning in rats (Bouton, Todd, Vurbic, & Winterbauer, 2011).…”