Resurgence of ethanol seeking following voluntary abstinence produced by nondrug differential reinforcement of other behavior.

Resurgence refers to the relapse of a target behavior following the worsening of a source of alternative reinforcement that was made available during response elimination. Most laboratory analyses of resurgence have used a combination of extinction and alternative reinforcement to reduce target behavior. In contingency-management treatments for alcohol use disorder, however, alcohol use is not placed on extinction. Instead, participants voluntarily abstain from alcohol use to access nondrug alternative reinforcers. Inasmuch, additional laboratory research on resurgence following voluntary abstinence is warranted. The present experiment evaluated resurgence of rats' ethanol seeking following voluntary abstinence produced by differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO). Lever pressing produced ethanol reinforcers during baseline phases. During DRO phases, lever pressing continued to produce ethanol and food reinforcers were delivered according to resetting DRO schedules. Ethanol and food reinforcers were suspended during resurgence test phases to evaluate resurgence following voluntary abstinence. Lever pressing was elevated during baseline phases and occurred at near-zero rates during DRO phases. During the resurgence test phases, lever pressing increased, despite that it no longer produced ethanol. The procedure introduced here may help researchers better understand the variables that affect voluntary abstinence from ethanol seeking and resurgence following voluntary abstinence.

Resistance to change, of behavior and of theory.

The persistence of operant behavior when disrupted tends to be positively related to how often reinforcers were delivered in the past. Behavioral momentum theory describes this finding as the outcome of Pavlovian processes. That is, the relation between discriminative stimuli and reinforcers that were delivered in their presence strengthens behavior, thereby making it more likely to persist. If only the story were that simple. A growing number of findings challenge the basic tenets of behavioral momentum theory. Some even call into question whether Pavlovian relations contribute to persistence in the first place. In this paper, I will review behavioral momentum theory and some of the data that have been problematic for the theory. I will argue that despite these very real challenges, the theory provides important utility not only to basic analyses of response persistence but also to clinical interventions directed at long-term reductions in problem behavior. It, for example, has set the stage for the development of alternative conceptual analyses of resistance to change, two of which will be highlighted for readers. Moreover, behavioral momentum theory may tell us something important about the reasons it continues to have an influence on the field, despite the challenging data that deter it.

Nondrug reinforcers contingent on alternative behavior or abstinence increase resistance to extinction and reinstatement of ethanol-maintained behavior.

The effects of delivering nondrug alternative reinforcement on resistance to extinction and reinstatement of rats' ethanol-maintained lever pressing were evaluated in two experiments. In both, rats self-administered ethanol by lever pressing in a two-component multiple schedule during baseline. In the Rich component, alternative food reinforcement was made available for performing an alternative response (Experiment 1) or according to a differential-reinforcement-of-other-behavior schedule for lever pressing (Experiment 2). In the Lean component, only ethanol was available. Moreover, the frequency of alternative reinforcement was manipulated across conditions in Experiment 1. Following baseline, lever pressing was extinguished in both components by suspending ethanol reinforcement, and alternative food reinforcers were discontinued. Finally, to test for reinstatement, ethanol reinforcers were delivered independently of lever pressing in both components. In both experiments, proportion-of-baseline response rates were higher during extinction and reinstatement testing in the Rich component than in the Lean component (although differentiation was not observed at the lowest frequency of alternative reinforcement in Experiment 1). Thus, alternative nondrug reinforcers increased resistance to extinction and reinstatement of rats' ethanol-maintained lever pressing, even when those reinforcers were delivered contingently on an alternative response or on abstinence from lever pressing.

Resurgence Following Traditional and Interdependent Differential Reinforcement of Alternative Behavior.

Clinicians frequently prescribe functional communication training (FCT) as a treatment for severe destructive behavior. Recent research has shown that FCT treatments are susceptible to treatment relapse in the form of resurgence of destructive behavior when individuals contact periods in which reinforcers are unavailable. Results of preliminary studies suggest that teaching multiple response alternatives can mitigate the resurgence of target behavior. The current evaluation serves as a preliminary study in which we used a laboratory arrangement to evaluate the effects of a novel approach to training multiple alternative responses on the resurgence of target behavior. Findings showed that multiple-response training did not decrease resurgence of target responding consistently; however, it increased the total amount of target and alternative responding observed during the resurgence phase and decreased the overall probability of the target response.

Resurgence following differential reinforcement of alternative behavior implemented with and without extinction.

In the clinic, differential reinforcement of alternative behavior (DRA) often involves programming extinction for destructive behavior while reinforcing an alternative form of communication (e.g., a functional communication response); however, implementing extinction can be unsafe or impractical under some circumstances. Quantitative theories of resurgence (i.e., Behavioral Momentum Theory and Resurgence as Choice) predict differences in the efficacy of treatments that do and do not involve extinction of target responding when reinforcement conditions maintaining alternative responding worsen. We tested these predictions by examining resurgence following two DRA conditions in which we equated rates of reinforcement. In DRA without extinction, target and alternative behavior produced reinforcement. In DRA with extinction plus noncontingent reinforcement, only alternative behavior produced reinforcement. We conducted this study in a reverse-translation sequence, first with participants who engaged in destructive behavior (Experiment 1) and then in a laboratory setting with rats (Experiment 2). Across both experiments, we observed proportionally lower levels of target responding during and following the DRA condition that arranged extinction for the target response. However, levels of resurgence were similar following both arrangements.

Measurement of nontargeted problem behavior during investigations of resurgence.

Resurgence occurs when a previously extinguished behavior reemerges once a more recently reinforced behavior is placed on extinction. Previous research has suggested that nontargeted responses within the same response class recur alongside target-response resurgence (e.g., da Silva, Maxwell, & Lattal, 2008; Lieving, Hagopian, Long, & O'Connor, 2004). The purpose of this two-experiment investigation was to examine target response resurgence while simultaneously measuring the occurrence of nontargeted responses. Three children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder who displayed multiple topographies of problem behavior participated. In Experiment 1, a three-phase resurgence procedure was conducted and all three participants displayed target-response resurgence accompanied by the emergence of nontargeted forms of problem behavior. These findings were replicated in Experiment 2 using a 30-min assessment procedure. The implications of these findings as they pertain to the treatment of severe problem behavior and utility of a brief relapse assessment are discussed.

Re-exposure to reinforcement in context a during treatment in context b reduces ABC renewal.

Previous work from our laboratory showed that intermittently re-exposing rats to reinforcement for lever pressing in a training (A) context, while eliminating lever pressing in a second (B) context, increased ABA renewal of lever pressing relative to rats that experienced only Context B during response elimination. In the current study, we replicated these procedures while assessing renewal in the presence of a novel context (i.e., ABC renewal). Unlike the findings described above, renewal was reduced in the group that experienced re-exposure to Context A during lever-press elimination relative to rats that experienced only Context B. These findings suggest that alternating between contexts associated with reinforcement and extinction during treatment reduces the probability that organisms will respond in novel contexts. These outcomes may be the result of discrimination and/or generalization processes. Moreover, this training procedure may offer a potential mitigation strategy for ABC renewal.

Behavioral momentum and resistance to extinction across repeated extinction tests.

The present experiments assessed whether resistance to extinction of pigeons' key pecking decreased across repeated extinction tests. An additional impetus for this research was to determine how the quantitative framework provided by behavioral momentum theory might be used to describe any such changes across tests. Pigeons pecked keys in two-component multiple schedules (one component associated with a higher reinforcer rate and the other with a lower rate) in which baseline and extinction conditions alternated. In Experiment 1, baseline and extinction conditions alternated every session, and, in Experiment 2, these conditions lasted for 10 and 7 sessions, respectively. Resistance to extinction decreased across successive extinction conditions in both experiments. Fits of the behavioral-momentum based model of extinction to the data returned uncertain results in Experiment 1 but implicated both generalization decrement and response-reinforcer contingency termination as the possible mechanisms responsible for behavior change in Experiment 2. Thus, these data suggest that experimental manipulations that affect discrimination of changes in reinforcement contingencies may influence resistance to extinction by modulating the disruptive impacts of removing reinforcers from the experimental context and of suspending response-reinforcer contingencies.

Further evaluation of a nonsequential approach to studying operant renewal.

Basic-laboratory assessments of renewal may inform clinical efforts to maintain reduction of severe destructive behavior when clients transition between contexts. The contextual changes arranged during standard renewal procedures, however, do not necessarily align with those that clients experience during outpatient therapy. More specifically, clients transition between clinical (associated with extinction for target behavior) and home/community (associated with reinforcement for target behavior) contexts during outpatient treatment. Standard renewal assessments do not incorporate these contextual alternations during treatment. The present experiment aimed to directly compare renewal of rats' lever pressing following a standard ("sequential") ABA renewal procedure (i.e., baseline in Context A, extinction in Context B, renewal test in Context A) and a "nonsequential" renewal assessment wherein treatment consisted of daily alternation between Context A (associated with reinforcement for lever pressing) and Context B (associated with extinction). Lever pressing renewed to a greater extent for rats in the Nonsequential group than for rats in the Sequential group, suggesting the contextual changes that clients experience during outpatient treatment for severe destructive behavior may be a variable that is important to consider in translational research on renewal. Potential implications of these findings for basic and clinical research on renewal are discussed.

Contingency, contiguity, and causality in conditioning: Applying information theory and Weber's Law to the assignment of credit problem.

Contingency is a critical concept for theories of associative learning and the assignment of credit problem in reinforcement learning. Measuring and manipulating it has, however, been problematic. The information-theoretic definition of contingency-normalized mutual information-makes it a readily computed property of the relation between reinforcing events, the stimuli that predict them and the responses that produce them. When necessary, the dynamic range of the required temporal representation divided by the Weber fraction gives a psychologically realistic plug-in estimates of the entropies. There is no measurable prospective contingency between a peck and reinforcement when pigeons peck on a variable interval schedule of reinforcement. There is, however, a perfect retrospective contingency between reinforcement and the immediately preceding peck. Degrading the retrospective contingency by gratis reinforcement reveals a critical value (.25), below which performance declines rapidly. Contingency is time scale invariant, whereas the perception of proximate causality depends-we assume-on there being a short, fixed psychologically negligible critical interval between cause and effect. Increasing the interval between a response and reinforcement that it triggers degrades the retrograde contingency, leading to a decline in performance that restores it to at or above its critical value. Thus, there is no critical interval in the retrospective effect of reinforcement. We conclude with a short review of the broad explanatory scope of information-theoretic contingencies when regarded as causal variables in conditioning. We suggest that the computation of contingencies may supplant the computation of the sum of all future rewards in models of reinforcement learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Treatment of resistance to change in children with autism.

"Resistance to change" represents a core symptom of autism that we conceptualized and assessed as resulting in part due to factors known to govern free-operant choice. During a free-choice baseline, participants chose between problematic, resistive responses and an appropriate alternative response. During the asymmetrical-choice condition, we delivered their most highly preferred item if the participant chose the alternative response (i.e., differential reinforcement of alternative behavior [DRA]). During the guided- (Experiment 1) and singular- (Experiment 2) choice conditions, we prompted participants to choose the alternative response and then delivered their most highly preferred item (i.e., DRA with escape extinction). All participants learned to tolerate (Experiment 1) or choose (Experiment 2) the alternative response when we combined DRA with escape extinction. After exposure to escape extinction, two participants showed strong maintenance effects with DRA alone. We discuss these finding relative to the effects of DRA and escape extinction on resistance to change.

Randomization tests as alternative analysis methods for behavior-analytic data.

Randomization statistics offer alternatives to many of the statistical methods commonly used in behavior analysis and the psychological sciences, more generally. These methods are more flexible than conventional parametric and nonparametric statistical techniques in that they make no assumptions about the underlying distribution of outcome variables, are relatively robust when applied to small-n data sets, and are generally applicable to between-groups, within-subjects, mixed, and single-case research designs. In the present article, we first will provide a historical overview of randomization methods. Next, we will discuss the properties of randomization statistics that may make them particularly well suited for analysis of behavior-analytic data. We will introduce readers to the major assumptions that undergird randomization methods, as well as some practical and computational considerations for their application. Finally, we will demonstrate how randomization statistics may be calculated for mixed and single-case research designs. Throughout, we will direct readers toward resources that they may find useful in developing randomization tests for their own data.

Baseline reinforcement rate and resurgence of destructive behavior.

Concepts from behavioral momentum theory, along with some empirical findings, suggest that the rate of baseline reinforcement may contribute to the relapse of severe destructive behavior. With seven children who engaged in destructive behavior, we tested this hypothesis in the context of functional communication training by comparing the effects of different baseline reinforcement rates on resurgence during a treatment challenge (i.e., extinction). We observed convincing resurgence of destructive behavior in four of seven participants, and we observed more resurgence in the condition associated with high-rate baseline reinforcement (i.e., variable-interval 2 s in Experiment 1 or fixed-ratio 1 in Experiment 2) compared to a low-rate baseline reinforcement condition. We discuss the implications of these results relative to schedules of reinforcement in the treatment of destructive behavior and strategies to mitigate resurgence in clinical settings.

Delivering alternative reinforcement in a distinct context reduces its counter-therapeutic effects on relapse.

Delivery of alternative reinforcers in the presence of stimuli previously associated with reinforcement for target behavior increases the susceptibility of target behavior to relapse. To explore contingencies that might mitigate this counter-therapeutic effect, we trained pigeons on a procedure that entailed extinction of previously reinforced target-key pecking, access to a distinct stimulus context contingently on refraining from target behavior (differential-reinforcement-of-other-behavior; DRO), and reinforcement of alternative-key pecks (differential-reinforcement of alternative behavior; DRA) in that context. This DRO-DRA treatment was compared with standard DRA in successive conditions, counterbalanced across pigeons. Target behavior extinguished more rapidly in the Standard-DRA condition. When alternative reinforcement was discontinued, however, there was less resurgence after DRO-DRA than after Standard DRA. In a third condition, the DRO contingency was suspended so that the former DRA stimuli were not presented (DRO-NAC), and resurgence was greater than in the Standard-DRA and DRO-DRA conditions. Reinstatement produced by response-independent reinforcers was small and similar across conditions. Subsequent reacquisition of target-key pecking under baseline reinforcement conditions was faster following DRO-NAC than Standard-DRA or DRO-DRA. These findings suggest that DRO-DRA might serve as a useful method in clinical settings for reducing problem behavior while minimizing the threat of posttreatment relapse.

On the predictive validity of behavioral momentum theory for mitigating resurgence of problem behavior.

We summarize the results of four recent translational studies from our lab that used the predictions of behavioral momentum theory to inform the development of more durable treatments for destructive behavior. Treatments informed by behavioral momentum theory generally showed better suppression of target responding during an extinction challenge than did a comparison treatment. We reanalyze data from each of the four studies to show that this general finding is apparent both at the aggregate (i.e., proportion of baseline response rates averaged across participants) and within participant (i.e., percentage reduction in proportion of baseline response rates, difference in raw response rates during the extinction challenge). Interestingly, participants who experienced multiple cycles of the extinction challenge generally showed less differentiation in target responding between the treatment informed by behavioral momentum theory and the comparison treatment. Overall results suggest that applications of behavioral momentum theory can substantially improve the durability of common treatments for destructive behavior.

Greater reinforcement rate during training increases spontaneous recovery.

Spontaneous recovery occurs when a previously reinforced and recently extinguished response reemerges over the course of time, often at the beginning of a new session of extinction. Spontaneous recovery could underlie instances of treatment relapse that threaten otherwise effective behavioral interventions for problem behavior. In two experiments, we arranged multiple schedules with pigeons and a human child to assess the effects of different training reinforcer rates on spontaneous recovery. In both experiments, responding was both more resistant to extinction and more likely to relapse following training with greater reinforcement rates upon returning to extinction after time off from extinction testing. A quantitative model based on behavioral momentum theory accounted well for the data, which suggests reexposure to the extinction context following time off during extinction resulted in (1) the failure of extinction learning to generalize, and (2) greater generalization of original learning during training. The present model attempts to quantify theories attributing spontaneous recovery to changes in temporal context.

Multiple schedules, off-baseline reinforcement shifts, and resistance to extinction.

Resistance to extinction in a target multiple-schedule component varies inversely with the rate of reinforcement arranged in an alternative component during baseline. The present experiment asked whether changing the reinforcer rate in an alternative component would impact extinction of target component responding if those changes occurred in an off-baseline phase during which the target component was never experienced. Pigeons' key pecking was studied in three types of conditions, and each condition consisted of three phases. In Phase 1, pecking produced food in the target and alternative components of a multiple schedule according to variable-interval 60-s schedules. In Phase 2, the alternative-component stimulus was presented alone in a single schedule. Pecking during this phase produced the same reinforcer rate as in baseline in the Control condition, a higher rate of food (variable-interval 15 s) in the High-Rate condition, or was extinguished in the Extinction condition. Extinction of target- and alternative-component key pecking then was assessed in a multiple schedule during the final phase of each condition. Resistance to extinction of target-component key pecking was the same between the Control and High-Rate conditions but lower in the Extinction condition. These findings are discussed in terms of discrimination and generalization processes.

Longer treatment with alternative non-drug reinforcement fails to reduce resurgence of cocaine or alcohol seeking in rats.

Provision of alternative non-drug reinforcement is among the most effective methods for treating substance use disorders. However, when alternative reinforcers become unavailable during treatment interruptions or upon cessation of treatment, relapse often occurs. Relapse following the loss of alternative reinforcement is known as resurgence. One factor that could reduce resurgence is longer duration of treatment with alternative reinforcement, but the available data are mixed. Further, the effects of length of treatment have previously only been examined with food seeking. The present experiments directly examined if duration of treatment impacted the magnitude of resurgence of cocaine or alcohol seeking in rats. First, rats were trained to self-administer cocaine (Experiment 1) or alcohol (Experiment 2) by performing a target behavior. Second, target behavior was extinguished and performing an alternative behavior produced an alternative non-drug (i.e., food) reinforcer. Finally, resurgence was assessed following removal of alternative reinforcement after either 5 or 20 sessions of treatment. Treatment duration did not differentially affect resurgence of cocaine seeking in Experiment 1 or Alcohol seeking in Experiment 2. These results suggest that extended treatment with alternative non-drug reinforcement may not decrease propensity to relapse. Further, these results may have implications for treatment of substance use disorders and for theories of resurgence.