Testing for Recurrence of Ratio-Strained Behavior with Reinstatement, Resurgence, and Renewal

Abstract

If more and more responding is required to earn a reinforcer, as in progressive ratio schedules, behavior eventually becomes "strained," characterized by long pauses and irregular response patterns. If the response requirement continues to escalate, behavior reaches a "break point" and ultimately ceases altogether for a period of time. The present experiments investigated whether responding can be regenerated after the break point has been reached, using techniques that are known to produce recurrence of behavior that was eliminated by extinction. Pigeons responded on progressive ratio schedules until stable performance was observed. Then, test sessions were conducted in which a recurrence procedure (reinstatement, renewal, or resurgence) was applied after the break point had been reached. All recurrence procedures regenerated responding, demonstrating that the same procedures known to produce recurrence of extinguished behavior also can produce recurrence of behavior eliminated by progressive-ratio schedules.

Repeated, within‐session resurgence

“…The procedures used in the three experiments reported here compressed a conventional three-stage resurgence procedure into a single-session test of resurgence that could then be repeated to generate resurgence over as many as 30 successive sessions. There have been a few previous reports of within-session resurgence with nonhuman animals (Bai et al, 2017;Kincaid, 2015;Kincaid & Lattal, 2018), but, as noted in the introduction, the Fig. 9.…”

“…Such demonstrations of repeated resurgence as those of Kincaid (2015;Kincaid & Lattal, 2018) and Bai et al (2017) expand the conditions under which resurgence can occur. The resurgence (and its controlling variables) that develops under the somewhat idiosyncratic conditions used in both those experiments, however, bear an unknown relation to the more conventional resurgence procedure.…”

“…The procedures used in the three experiments reported here compressed a conventional three‐stage resurgence procedure into a single‐session test of resurgence that could then be repeated to generate resurgence over as many as 30 successive sessions. There have been a few previous reports of within‐session resurgence with nonhuman animals (Bai et al, ; Kincaid, ; Kincaid & Lattal, ), but, as noted in the introduction, the resurgence generated under these conditions bears an unknown relation to that generated by the more conventional, across‐session means of assessing resurgence and its controlling variables. By contrast, not only do the present procedures precisely parallel, within individual sessions, the conventional procedure, the results replicate the appearance of resurgence with both fixed‐ and variable‐interval schedules (cf.…”

“…Two recent experiments have examined resurgence within and across successive sessions. Kincaid (2015;see Kincaid and Lattal, 2018) and Bai, Cowie, and Podlesnik (2017) investigated within-session resurgence using, respectively, a progressive-ratio schedule and a free-operant psychophysical procedure (FOPP). With both procedures, resurgence developed within individual sessions and the effect was repeated across at least a few successive sessions.…”