Recovery of extinction responding in rats following discontinuation of reinforcement of alternative behavior: A test of two explanations

Abstract

One procedure which has been used to supplement extinction in order to produce faster and more complete response suppression is to provide reinforcement for some alternative response which is incompatible with the response undergoing extinction. When reinforcement for the alternative behavior is discontinued, however, substantial recovery of the original response has often been observed. The present set of experiments demonstrated that such recovery is best accounted for by a "response prevention" hypothesis rather than by a "discriminative cue" hypothesis. High-frequency reinforcement of alternative behavior during the first half of an extinction phase seems similar in effect to procedures which physically prevent rats from emitting the response programmed for extinction. © 1977 Psychonomic Society, Inc.