Reading focus
Syllabus: Why Does Learned Behavior Persist—and When Does It Change?
Follow how the alternative response, its consequences, and the original response's history are separated experimentally. Connect the context interpretation to the renewal designs while recognizing that food deliveries, as well as rooms, can change.
A question to consider. If two conditions suppress the old response by different amounts but produce similar resurgence, what does that imply for an explanation based only on response prevention?
Why this reading
Replacing an old source of reward with an alternative can suppress the old response, yet its return needs explanation when the alternative stops working. These experiments distinguish resurgence from simple competition between two responses.
Before you read
The procedure has three phases: reinforce the first lever press; extinguish it while providing an alternative source of food; then discontinue that alternative. Resurgence is the return of the earlier response. Response prevention is the hypothesis that competition kept the animal from making enough unrewarded first responses to learn extinction. A yoked comparison matches one group's food deliveries to another's while changing their dependence on behavior.
Read for
- Keep the first response's history separate from what happens to the alternative in each phase. Use the experimental-design table to follow the comparisons.
- Ask what Experiment 3 contributes by comparing animals with and without earlier reinforcement of the first response.
- In Experiment 4, distinguish food-delivery rate, response contingency, and competition. Decide whether similar resurgence despite different suppression rules out response prevention as the sole account.
Consider afterwards
- An old response returns when a newly rewarded response is no longer rewarded. What comparison would show that the increase depends on the old response's reinforcement history rather than a general increase in activity?
Editorial context
The four rat experiments support resurgence across several reinforcement arrangements and constrain a response-prevention explanation. The authors interpret the transition away from alternative reinforcement as a change of context. This is an explanatory proposal, not a uniquely demonstrated mechanism. Shahan and Craig (2017) instead model changing relative values across a reinforcement history. Applications to human behavior require evidence about the actual responses, alternatives, and settings involved.