Research figure: B. F. Skinner · Written by Artificial Sapiens
Extinction in Skinner's Experimental Science of Behavior
In B. F. Skinner's experimental analysis of behavior, operant extinction is the process in which a response that has previously produced reinforcement no longer produces that consequence. When the response–reinforcer contingency is discontinued, responding often declines across subsequent opportunities. The rate and pattern of that decline depend on the behavior's history, the prevailing stimulus conditions, the reinforcers involved, and the way extinction is arranged and measured. Resistance to extinction describes how strongly responding persists when the established reinforcement contingency is removed.
The distinction between the extinction procedure and its behavioral outcome is essential. The procedure changes a consequence relation: a lever press that previously produced a food pellet no longer does so. A reduction in lever pressing may follow, but its occurrence, speed, and shape must be observed rather than assumed. Extinction is not simply elapsed time, a decision to ignore someone, or a synonym for forgetting. These distinctions organize both Skinner's historical experiments and contemporary research on response persistence, renewal, and relapse. Modern reviews establish that extinction often creates new learning whose expression depends on context; previously learned behavior can reappear after an apparent decline (Bouton, Maren, and McNally, 2021).
Skinner made extinction a quantitative experimental problem. The questions were not confined to whether an animal eventually stopped responding. He investigated how the cumulative number of responses, response rate, pauses, bouts, and changes over time reflected earlier reinforcement. His approach connected individual-organism records with controlled changes in contingencies and helped establish extinction as a major operation in the experimental analysis of behavior. The general phenomenon remains central to learning science, while this article focuses specifically on Skinner's contribution, the subsequent reinterpretation of response persistence, and the limits of extending laboratory findings to human settings.
Historical Origins: From the Law of Effect to a Quantitative Research Program
Edward L. Thorndike's law of effect supplied an important historical precedent: the consequences of an act influence its subsequent occurrence. John B. Watson later articulated a public behaviorist research program. Skinner developed a different and increasingly precise experimental system, organized around an organism's behavior as a function of its history and environment. Attribution matters here. Thorndike is the historical author of the law of effect; Watson shaped an earlier behaviorist movement; Skinner introduced a distinctive analysis of operant processes using controlled apparatus, response records, and systematic contingency manipulation.
Skinner's work on extinction preceded the publication of his major 1938 monograph. In 1933 he published both “On the Rate of Extinction of a Conditioned Reflex” and “‘Resistance to Extinction’ in the Process of Conditioning.” The following year he published “The Extinction of Chained Reflexes,” and in 1936 “Conditioning and Extinction and Their Relation to Drive.” These historical titles use a reflex vocabulary characteristic of his early experimental period. Their importance lies partly in showing how the questions of response persistence, conditioned sequences, motivational operations, and histories of reinforcement were being investigated before the mature terminology of operant conditioning was consolidated. The dates and titles are corroborated by the B. F. Skinner Foundation's full bibliography.
In The Behavior of Organisms (1938), Skinner brought his experimental methods and theoretical categories into a systematic account. The monograph established the distinction between respondent and operant classes as a central organizing device. Respondent behavior was analyzed in relation to eliciting stimuli; operant behavior was analyzed through response classes and the consequences contingent on their occurrence. Extinction therefore required an experimentally specified history: identifying what had reinforced a response and changing that contingency. The book's treatment belongs to the history of experimental science, not to an automatic clinical prescription for present-day interventions (Skinner Foundation, bibliography).
The early record also makes a methodological point. A historical paper named “conditioned reflex” cannot simply be read backward as identical to a modern free-operant trial or a contemporary clinical extinction procedure. Skinner's formulations developed with his apparatus and terminology. A careful history specifies the actual response, consequence, discriminative setting, and recording method rather than treating successive stages of his thinking as interchangeable.
What Skinner's Experimental Procedures Measured
Skinner's experimental arrangements commonly used an animal such as a rat, an operant chamber with a manipulandum such as a lever, a means of delivering food, and a recording system that tracked responding over time. In an acquisition arrangement, lever pressing could operate a food-delivery mechanism. During an extinction phase, pressing remained physically possible while its previously arranged food consequence was withheld. This permitted response persistence to be studied without redefining every lever press as a new trial. Pigeons later became important organisms in the larger Skinnerian research tradition; the chamber, manipulanda, discriminative lights or keys, and food-delivery contingencies varied across preparations.
The cumulative recorder translated repeated responses into a graphical trajectory: each response advanced the trace, while time moved along its horizontal dimension. A steep segment indicated a high response rate, a flat segment a pause, and changes in slope made the temporal course of extinction visible. Such records allowed the investigator to examine local rates and pauses rather than only the number of responses before an arbitrary endpoint. They also exposed differences between the immediate transition following reinforcement and the later course of declining responding.
A defensible extinction experiment has at least three linked stages. It establishes a reproducible response–reinforcer relation, documents the resulting baseline and contextual conditions, and then removes or discontinues the specified reinforcer for that response while measuring the change. Some investigations add a recovery or reinstatement test. Variables requiring control include deprivation or satiation, session duration, characteristics of the response, schedule of reinforcement, and the cues that distinguish training from extinction. If these factors change simultaneously, the effect attributed to extinction may instead reflect competing processes such as fatigue, changes in motivation, or the introduction of alternative reinforcement.
Response rate is one useful dependent measure, but it is not the only one. Investigators may examine total responses during extinction, time to a defined low-rate criterion, response variability, latency, bout structure, and subsequent recovery. The measure selected influences the apparent degree of resistance. A subject that produces a brief high-rate burst followed by silence can look highly persistent on one early-rate index and less persistent on another longer-term measure. The scientifically informative outcome is the complete pattern under an explicitly reported procedure.
Operant Extinction, Respondent Extinction, and Punishment
In operant extinction, the consequence that maintained a response is discontinued. In respondent or Pavlovian extinction, a previously conditioned stimulus is repeatedly encountered without the expected unconditioned stimulus. The procedures and learning relations differ, even though both may produce a decline in conditioned responding. An operant may also be maintained by escape, attention, access to materials, sensory consequences, or more than one source of reinforcement; removing one consequence need not extinguish a response still maintained by another.
Punishment involves a consequence relation that decreases the future probability of behavior in a particular setting. Extinction instead involves discontinuing the maintaining reinforcement contingency. For example, no longer delivering a food pellet after a lever press describes an extinction operation when pellets had previously reinforced that response. Introducing an aversive event contingent on the press would be a different operation. A reduction in the observed behavior alone does not reveal which process occurred. The analysis depends on the history and the arranged consequence.
Withholding social attention may sometimes form part of extinction when functional assessment shows that social attention maintains the target behavior. Its clinical meaning changes when the behavior functions to escape a demand, obtain an object, or produce automatic sensory consequences. An extinction procedure that ignores this functional distinction can miss its intended mechanism, while ignoring signs of pain, distress, communication needs, or risk can raise serious ethical problems. Historical animal-laboratory definitions must therefore be translated into human interventions only after functional, developmental, safety, and consent considerations have been addressed.
Resistance to Extinction: Why Reinforcement History Matters
Resistance to extinction refers to persistence after the response no longer produces the reinforcer on which its acquisition or maintenance depended. The phrase sometimes suggests a stable trait of the organism. In Skinner's analysis it is better understood as a relation between past contingencies and current conditions, operationalized in a specific measurement context. Differences in prior schedules, reinforcer rates, stimulus arrangements, and motivation can produce different extinction trajectories without requiring a mysterious reserve of willpower.
A major experimental finding in the history of conditioning is the partial-reinforcement extinction effect. Under many familiar preparations, responses reinforced intermittently during training can continue longer during extinction than responses reinforced on every acquisition opportunity. An intuitively useful explanation is that nonreinforced responses are already part of the intermittently reinforced training history; the arrival of a nonreinforced response in extinction supplies less evidence that circumstances have changed. Yet the generality of the effect depends on schedules, organisms, training exposure, dependent measures, and procedural comparisons. Researchers should avoid turning a frequently observed pattern into an unconditional law.
Skinner's schedule research laid a foundation for such questions, but the definitive 1957 Schedules of Reinforcement was a joint work of Charles B. Ferster and B. F. Skinner. Their analysis helped establish how differential patterns of reinforcement generate characteristic response-rate and timing patterns. Ratio, interval, fixed, and variable arrangements differ in what they require for reinforcement and thus in the histories organisms carry into extinction. The familiar observation that variable reinforcement can produce durable responding belongs to that experimental history, yet different arrangements cannot be ranked correctly without specifying the parameters being compared (Ferster and Skinner, 1957).
The history of intermittent reinforcement also generated competing explanatory families. Discrimination accounts emphasize whether the organism can detect the change from training to extinction. Sequential accounts emphasize the sequence of rewarded and unrewarded events. Frustration-based accounts examine what nonreward itself comes to signal or motivate. Later associative and statistical learning models describe expectations of reward or changing environmental states. These are research programs developed by a range of investigators and cannot be attributed wholesale to Skinner. They illuminate why the same nominal reinforcement percentage can have different effects when reinforcers are clustered, spaced, or embedded in distinct contextual cues.
One practical implication follows: persistence in an everyday habit cannot be inferred merely from the statement that it was “intermittently reinforced.” The kind of reinforcement, the availability of substitutes, the timing of outcomes, the environmental cues, and the person's goals may matter as much as the aggregate reinforcement proportion. Applying the partial-reinforcement effect responsibly requires specifying those variables.
Behavioral Momentum and Resistance to Change
Research after Skinner introduced a further distinction between how frequently a behavior occurs and how strongly it resists disruption. John A. Nevin's behavioral momentum framework treats baseline response rate and resistance to change as separable measures. In the physical analogy, response rate resembles velocity, while resistance to disruption resembles momentum or inertia. The analogy offers a quantitative strategy for describing an experimentally observed relation; it does not assert that behavior literally obeys Newtonian mechanics.
In multiple-schedule studies, a stimulus context associated with a relatively rich history of reinforcement can support greater resistance to extinction than a leaner context, even when baseline response rates do not align with that difference. This is a significant development because extinction is not explained solely by counting how many responses were reinforced. The relation between reinforcers and the discriminative environment itself contributes to the strength of subsequent responding. Nevin and Randolph Grace synthesized these findings in “Behavioral Momentum and the Law of Effect” (Nevin and Grace, 2000).
At first sight, this result appears to conflict with the partial-reinforcement extinction effect. If continuous reinforcement is richer, why can partially reinforced behavior sometimes survive longer without reinforcement? Nevin's later analysis explains that extinction introduces more than a single change: it removes the reinforcing consequence and changes the pattern of nonreward. The transition away from continuous reinforcement can itself be a stronger disruption, even when a rich history made performance resistant to other disrupters. The different findings concern procedures and functions that overlap but are not identical. Their reconciliation requires explicit models, not a slogan about which schedule always creates more persistence (Nevin, 2012).
This later theory belongs to Nevin, Grace, and other contributors to quantitative behavioral analysis. Skinner's experimental program created much of the methodological ground on which it developed; he did not personally formulate every modern behavioral-momentum equation. The historical chain runs from the systematic manipulation of reinforcement, through the analysis of response persistence, to quantitative models that distinguish rates of response from resistance to alteration.
Why Extinguished Operant Behavior Can Return
A decrease during extinction does not establish that the original learning has vanished. Modern experimental evidence shows several ways in which responding may recover after apparently successful extinction. These findings are important for interpreting historical claims about “eliminating” behavior and for evaluating educational or clinical attempts to produce durable change. Bouton, Maren, and McNally's review integrates evidence across instrumental and Pavlovian learning and emphasizes the context sensitivity of extinction (Bouton, Maren, and McNally, 2021).
Renewal after a change in context
Renewal is the return of an extinguished response when the context changes after extinction. In a classic ABA arrangement, acquisition takes place in context A, extinction in B, and testing again in A. An ABC arrangement tests in a novel context C; an AAB arrangement extinguishes in the original context A and tests in B. In all three arrangements the test context can reduce the retrieval or expression of the extinction learning, allowing the earlier response to reappear. “Context” includes more than a room: temporal cues, motivational states, and background stimulus configurations may acquire contextual functions.
Bouton, Todd, Vurbic, and Winterbauer examined renewal following extinction of free-operant behavior in rats. Their experiments showed that the return of lever pressing after contextual changes is not restricted to classical conditioning procedures. Such studies sharpen the interpretation of extinction by testing new contexts after acquisition and extinction phases, rather than inferring permanence from reduced responding during one training session (Bouton et al., 2011).
Spontaneous recovery, reacquisition, and reinstatement
Spontaneous recovery refers to the return of responding after time has passed since extinction, even without renewed response-contingent reinforcement during that interval. Reacquisition refers to learning again when the reinforcement contingency is restored; the speed of reacquisition can reveal an influence of earlier training history. Reinstatement describes response recovery after presentations of a reinforcer or related event under relevant conditions. These phenomena are experimentally distinguished by their test manipulations. The return of a response in everyday life, without information about what changed, should not automatically be classified as one particular mechanism.
The conceptual consequence is substantial. Extinction performance is evidence about present behavior under a specific contingency and context. Claims about enduring changes in memory, value, or future action require separate measures and recovery tests. Some experimental conditions produce enduring reductions; others expose rapid renewal or reacquisition. The scientifically important question is when each pattern occurs.
Resurgence when an alternative response loses reinforcement
Resurgence concerns the reappearance of an earlier reinforced behavior when a more recently reinforced alternative behavior loses access to reinforcement. Consider a sequence in which response A initially produces a reinforcer, response A is reduced while an alternative response B earns reinforcement, and then reinforcement for B is removed or reduced. Response A may return even though A is still on extinction. This differs from simple restoration of the original contingency; the older response returns amid changing reinforcement of another behavior.
Formal resurgence models were developed by later researchers, including John Shahan and colleagues, rather than being authored by Skinner. They use the vocabulary and experimental logic of operant contingencies while addressing relapse problems that go beyond the original extinction curves. Mechanistic accounts differ in how they explain alternative reinforcement, disruption, choice, and transitions across phases (Shahan and Sweeney, 2011). The combined lesson of renewal, recovery, and resurgence is that persistence is a dynamic feature of an organism's learning history and current environment.
Extinction Bursts, Variability, and Other Short-Term Effects
A reduction in average response rate can be preceded by an initial rise, called an extinction burst. Response variability or intensity may also change during the transition away from reinforcement. These possibilities have often been simplified in public accounts as though every individual must respond more intensely before the behavior declines. The empirical literature supports a narrower conclusion: bursts are possible, their occurrence varies by situation, and their definition depends on how the baseline and extinction phase are compared.
Dorothea Lerman and Brian Iwata reviewed 113 sets of applied extinction data and identified bursts in 24% of the cases under their operational criteria. Bursts appeared in 12% of cases involving extinction combined with alternative procedures and 36% when extinction was used alone. These figures describe that collection of studies and those analytic definitions, not the universal probability of a burst whenever reinforcement is withheld (Lerman and Iwata, 1995).
The possibility of aggression or other adverse side effects needs separate consideration. A high-risk behavior becoming more intense, even temporarily, can make a procedure ethically unacceptable in a particular context. Applied experiments on severe behavior have documented such events and show why an intervention needs adequate assessment, safety planning, monitoring, and feasible alternatives. A child's request for help or an adult's expression of pain cannot responsibly be treated as a mere experimental response whose significance is exhausted by a reinforcement schedule.
An observed burst may also have multiple explanations. When a previously effective action stops producing a result, the organism may vary its form or intensity, repeat established variants, or switch among responses. A temporary increase in pressing or calling out does not by itself prove that extinction will ultimately work, nor does it demonstrate that an intervention is correctly targeting the maintaining reinforcer. Interpretation requires the procedure, baseline, functional relation, and complete outcome.
Extinction in Contemporary Applied Behavior Analysis
Skinner's research helped establish the experimental foundation from which later applied behavior analysis developed. The field's establishment as an applied discipline also depended on independent contributions, especially Donald Baer, Montrose Wolf, and Todd Risley's 1968 articulation of applied behavior analysis, together with later methodological, ethical, and clinical work. Current assessment and treatment decisions should therefore be attributed to the contemporary empirical literature rather than represented as Skinner's own clinical experiments.
In applied practice, extinction means withholding the particular consequence shown to maintain a response, not generically withholding all attention or isolating a person. The correct procedure depends on a functional analysis or a comparably sound functional assessment. For example, a response maintained by escape from an aversive demand differs from a response maintained by social attention. Extinction of dangerous behavior may be infeasible or require conditions in which safety is established first. Reinforcement of a meaningful alternative response is often evaluated alongside any extinction component.
Functional communication training provides a revealing example. A person is taught a communication response that accesses an appropriate consequence, while the earlier problematic response no longer produces the same consequence under the treatment arrangement. The goal is to establish an effective way of requesting assistance, a break, attention, or another appropriate result. The quality of the replacement response and the reliability of the environment's response to it are integral to the intervention, not peripheral details.
Volkert, Lerman, Call, and Trosclair-Lasserre studied resurgence during functional communication training with five participants. Problem behavior reemerged for four participants when the communicative response contacted extinction or thinner reinforcement arrangements. This result illustrates how relapse may arise when a recently established alternative becomes ineffective or difficult to use. The study offers specific applied evidence, but its small participant group and setting-specific procedures do not establish a universal rate for all people or interventions (Volkert et al., 2009).
These findings have a direct ethical meaning. A communication system must work sufficiently well where the person uses it. A treatment that teaches an appropriate request and then makes access to its consequence unpredictable without proper preparation can undermine the alternative while leaving the earlier history of reinforcement intact. Generalization across settings, caregiver training, maintenance, schedule-thinning procedures, and careful tracking of adverse effects are substantive design problems. They cannot be solved by assuming that extinction is synonymous with a permanent erasure of behavior.
Behavioral interventions are evaluated by clinically meaningful outcomes and by ethical standards that address autonomy, assent, dignity, safety, and the individual's goals. Experimental support for a behavioral mechanism is distinct from proof that any particular intervention is suitable or effective for a person. The strongest applied claims require appropriately designed studies, transparent outcome definitions, and consideration of the people affected by the treatment.
Extinction, Cognitive Models, and Behavioral Neuroscience
Contemporary psychology describes extinction at several explanatory levels. A behavioral account specifies an observable response, its discriminative conditions, its prior consequences, and the effects of changing those contingencies. Associative theories ask what relations are learned or retrieved across acquisition and extinction. Cognitive models address expectations, inferred environmental states, goals, and decisions under uncertainty. Neuroscience examines the circuits and plasticity associated with learning, performance, and context-sensitive recovery. These levels can inform one another, while answering different experimental questions.
One class of models treats extinction as new learning about what happens in a changed situation. When a familiar action ceases to deliver an expected outcome, the learner may acquire information that the action is currently ineffective. This knowledge need not destroy the earlier action–outcome association. Later cues may favor retrieval of the original relation or the extinction relation. Such an approach explains why the same behavior can be suppressed in the extinction setting and renewed elsewhere. Context specificity is therefore an empirical property requiring direct tests of behavior across settings, not an ad hoc exception to learning theory (Bouton, Maren, and McNally, 2021).
Instrumental learning also includes distinctions between goal-directed action and habitual responding. Goal-directed action is sensitive to the present value of its expected outcome and the causal relation between response and outcome. Habitual control can become less sensitive to outcome value under some training conditions. Extinction performance alone cannot decide which control system is responsible: a decline may reflect a changed belief about action effectiveness, reduced motivation, competing activity, or the learned significance of contextual cues. Outcome-devaluation and contingency-degradation tests add information beyond a conventional extinction curve.
Neurobiological research examines contributions of corticostriatal systems, the amygdala, hippocampal networks, and prefrontal circuitry to different forms of instrumental and Pavlovian learning and their extinction. There is no single anatomical “extinction center” whose activity is sufficient to explain all response classes. Neural findings depend on the species, training procedure, behavioral measure, and precise manipulation of neural activity. A rat's lever-press relapse is an informative experimental model, but direct inference from that record to a human clinical outcome requires additional translational evidence.
Skinner's historical preference for functional experimental description continues to offer methodological discipline: the behavioral phenomenon must be specified and replicated before explanations are declared adequate. Modern cognitive and neurobiological studies extend the explanatory resources available for investigating that phenomenon. It is historically inaccurate to attribute these modern computational or circuit models to Skinner personally, and scientifically unproductive to assume that naming a neural circuit makes the behavioral contingency irrelevant.
Causal Inference, Replication, and Limits of Generalization
The basic operant extinction effect is well established under controlled conditions: when a response no longer produces a reinforcer that previously maintained it, responding often declines. The specific course of extinction, its recovery, and its transfer across contexts are more complex. Substantial experimental literatures document partial-reinforcement effects, behavioral momentum, renewal, spontaneous recovery, and resurgence. Confidence in each claim should follow the relevant designs and measurements rather than the prominence of a memorable example.
The strongest causal inference about extinction comes from experimental manipulation that changes the response–reinforcer contingency while holding important conditions stable, with repeated observations of the same organism and appropriate comparisons. Single-subject designs can demonstrate functional relations when they incorporate sufficient repetition, prediction, verification, and replication. General claims across species, populations, and settings require cumulative evidence. A striking individual record is valuable evidence about that preparation, but it is not automatically a population-average effect or a clinical recommendation.
Several recurrent interpretive problems warrant attention. A declining response might reflect satiation, fatigue, illness, loss of access to the response device, environmental interference, or reinforcement changes other than those intended. A seemingly extinguished response may persist at a very low rate, reappear after a context change, or return when alternatives fail. The selected extinction criterion may obscure these possibilities. Researchers therefore should report baseline conditions, prior reinforcement histories, the exact definition of extinction, session timing, response measures, exclusion rules, and follow-up testing.
Publication and replication practices matter as well. Effects that depend strongly on training schedules, timing, organism characteristics, and contextual stimuli need systematic parameter mapping. Replicating a broad headline without matching the operative contingencies is an inadequate test of a specific experimental claim. Contemporary synthesis benefits from open methods, cumulative datasets, individual-level trajectories when appropriate, and transparent acknowledgment of null or mixed findings.
The applied evidence base is especially heterogeneous. A laboratory extinction effect may be robust even when its clinical implementation is inappropriate, burdensome, or insufficient. An intervention study may combine functional assessment, extinction, communication training, differential reinforcement, and environmental changes. The outcome of the package cannot be assigned to extinction alone unless the design isolates its contribution. Claims about durable benefit require maintenance and generalization outcomes, along with measurement of adverse effects and the individual's functional well-being.
The Conceptual and Ethical Legacy of Skinner's Extinction Research
Skinner's work established a durable question about the relation between behavioral history and present action: how can earlier consequences continue to matter after the environment has changed? His experimental answer was to arrange a well-defined reinforcement history and observe what occurred when the previously effective response stopped producing its consequence. This question reached beyond any single schedule or apparatus and remains visible in contemporary research on persistence, recovery, choice, and behavioral flexibility.
The consequences of learning history are often useful. Persistence permits action despite occasional setbacks and unpredictable results. In other circumstances, a previously effective response continues after circumstances have changed in ways that make it ineffective or harmful. Explaining the difference requires understanding competing reinforcement, context, motivation, and opportunity for alternative action. Scientific descriptions of response persistence do not by themselves decide which habits society should encourage or whose preferences should govern behavioral intervention.
Skinner's writings also prompted a continuing philosophical discussion about control, autonomy, and the ethics of arranging environments. These questions belong partly to philosophy and political theory and require arguments beyond demonstrations with laboratory animals. Ethical practice can use information about reinforcement while recognizing persons as participants with interests, communication needs, rights, and the capacity to influence the goals and conditions of intervention. For vulnerable people, assent, informed authorization where applicable, proportionality, independent oversight, and safeguards against harm are part of responsible implementation.
Within the longer history of psychology, extinction research exemplifies the cumulative character of science. Skinner's early papers established quantitative laboratory questions. Ferster and Skinner broadened the experimental analysis of reinforcement schedules. Nevin, Grace, Bouton, Shahan, and many others developed distinct models of persistence and relapse. Applied researchers extended the questions to human behavior with their own empirical methods and ethical obligations. Preserving these separate contributions produces a clearer account of Skinner's influence than assigning every later discovery to one founder.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did B. F. Skinner mean by extinction?
Skinner used extinction to study what happens when a previously reinforced operant response no longer produces its accustomed reinforcing consequence. He measured changes in responding after that contingency was discontinued. The operation and the measured behavioral effect must be distinguished; the procedure may produce different trajectories under different reinforcement histories.
Does extinction erase previously learned behavior?
An observed decline during extinction does not prove that earlier learning has been erased. Laboratory studies of renewal, spontaneous recovery, reinstatement, and resurgence demonstrate that extinguished responding can return under specific conditions. Contemporary interpretations often describe extinction as involving new, context-sensitive learning that competes with or changes the expression of an earlier behavioral history (Bouton, Maren, and McNally, 2021).
Why can intermittent reinforcement make a behavior harder to extinguish?
Intermittent reinforcement can establish a history in which many responses already occur without reward. During extinction, additional unrewarded responses may be less distinct from that training history. The result depends on the schedule, sequential distribution of reinforcers, testing method, and comparison being made. Richer reinforcement can also produce greater resistance to other disruptions in behavioral-momentum research, so the exact procedure matters (Nevin, 2012).
Is resistance to extinction the same as a high response rate?
No. Response rate describes how frequently behavior occurs under specified conditions; resistance to extinction concerns how responding changes when reinforcement is discontinued. Two performances can have different baseline rates and different relative rates of change after the same disruption. Behavioral-momentum research was developed partly to investigate this distinction (Nevin and Grace, 2000).
Does every extinction procedure produce an extinction burst?
No. Bursts occur in some procedures, but they are not a required stage. Lerman and Iwata identified bursts in 24% of 113 sets of applied extinction data under their definitions. Where a behavior poses a risk of injury or aggression, even a possible temporary increase must be considered during treatment design (Lerman and Iwata, 1995).
How does extinction research relate to functional communication training?
Functional communication training reinforces an appropriate communication response that serves an identified function. Some treatment arrangements also discontinue the reinforcement that previously maintained a different response. Research on resurgence shows that an earlier response may return when the new communication response stops producing a reliable result. This underscores the importance of maintaining accessible alternatives and assessing behavior over time (Volkert et al., 2009).
Who developed modern theories of renewal and resurgence?
The modern experimental and theoretical literatures were developed by multiple researchers after Skinner. Mark Bouton and colleagues advanced the analysis of context-dependent renewal and recovery; John Nevin and Randolph Grace developed behavioral-momentum models; John Shahan and collaborators developed quantitative accounts of resurgence. Their work draws on operant research traditions while offering later theoretical explanations of specific findings.
Related Articles
B. F. Skinner — The central scientific chapter on Skinner's life, experimental analysis of behavior, radical behaviorism, foundational books, and lasting influence on psychology.
Learning Theories in Education: Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism, and Sociocultural Learning — A broader account of learning traditions and their interpretation in educational research.
Behavior Change Techniques: What Research Supports — An evidence-oriented account of contemporary behavior-change methods, distinct from Skinner's historical extinction program.
B. F. Skinner on Positive Reinforcement, Negative Reinforcement, and Punishment — Functional distinctions among behavioral consequences.
B. F. Skinner's Superstition in the Pigeon Experiment — The 1948 response-independent food experiment.
B. F. Skinner's Three-Term Contingency and Stimulus Control — Antecedents, contingencies, and discriminative control.
References
Bouton, M. E., Maren, S., and McNally, G. P. (2021). Behavioral and neurobiological mechanisms of Pavlovian and instrumental extinction learning. Physiological Reviews, 101(2), 611–681. https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00016.2020.
Bouton, M. E., Todd, T. P., Vurbic, D., and Winterbauer, N. E. (2011). Renewal after the extinction of free operant behavior. Learning and Behavior, 39, 57–67. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-011-0018-6.
Ferster, C. B., and Skinner, B. F. (1957). Schedules of Reinforcement. Appleton-Century-Crofts. https://books.google.com/books/about/Schedules_of_Reinforcement.html?id=-a19AAAAMAAJ.
Lerman, D. C., and Iwata, B. A. (1995). Prevalence of the extinction burst and its attenuation during treatment. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 28(1), 93–94. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1995.28-93.
Nevin, J. A. (2012). Resistance to extinction and behavioral momentum. Behavioural Processes, 90(1), 89–97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2012.02.006.
Nevin, J. A., and Grace, R. C. (2000). Behavioral momentum and the law of effect. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(1), 73–90. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00002405.
Shahan, T. A., and Sweeney, M. M. (2011). A model of resurgence based on behavioral momentum theory. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 95(1), 91–108. https://doi.org/10.1901/jeab.2011.95-91.
Skinner, B. F. (1933a). On the rate of extinction of a conditioned reflex. Journal of General Psychology, 8, 114–129. B. F. Skinner Foundation bibliography.
Skinner, B. F. (1933b). “Resistance to extinction” in the process of conditioning. Journal of General Psychology, 9, 420–429. B. F. Skinner Foundation bibliography.
Skinner, B. F. (1934). The extinction of chained reflexes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 20, 234–237. B. F. Skinner Foundation bibliography.
Skinner, B. F. (1936). Conditioning and extinction and their relation to drive. Journal of General Psychology, 14, 296–317. B. F. Skinner Foundation bibliography.
Skinner, B. F. (1938). The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis. Appleton-Century. B. F. Skinner Foundation bibliography.
Volkert, V. M., Lerman, D. C., Call, N. A., and Trosclair-Lasserre, N. (2009). An evaluation of resurgence during treatment with functional communication training. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 42(1), 145–160. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.2009.42-145.