Multiple control responses and resurgence of human behavior

A systematic review of enhanced resurgence paradigms

Following successful treatment in which problem behavior is reduced, it may reemerge as a function of changes in contextual stimuli or the worsening of reinforcement conditions for an alternative response. Although understudied, preliminary research suggests that simultaneous changes in contextual stimuli and reinforcement conditions may represent particularly exigent treatment challenges that create the condition for additive or superadditive relapse. The purpose of the present review was to systematically examine the relapse literature involving simultaneous changes in contextual stimuli and reinforcement conditions in relapse tests and experimental preparations arranged to evaluate their effect on response recovery. We identified 16 empirical articles spanning 27 experiments. Although all experiments included at least one condition that experienced a change in contextual stimuli and worsening of alternative reinforcement conditions, only two experiments included the comparison conditions needed to precisely evaluate additive and superadditive relapse. Our findings establish the preclinical generality of relapse effects associated with simultaneous changes to reinforcement conditions and contextual stimuli across a range of subjects, schedule arrangements, response topographies, reinforcers, and types of contextual changes. We make several recommendations for future research based on our findings from this nascent and clinically relevant subdomain of the relapse literature.

A Comprehensive Systematic Review of Procedures and Analyses Used in Basic and Preclinical Studies of Resurgence, 1970-2020

Resurgence is the return of a previously reinforced response as conditions worsen for an alternative response, such as the introduction of extinction, reductions in reinforcement, or punishment. As a procedure, resurgence has been used to model behavioral treatments and understand behavioral processes contributing both to relapse of problem behavior and flexibility during problem-solving. Identifying existing procedural and analytic methods arranged in basic/preclinical research could be used by basic and preclinical researchers to develop novel approaches to study resurgence, whereas translational and clinical researchers could identify potential approaches to combating relapse during behavioral interventions. Despite the study of resurgence for over half a century, there have been no systematic reviews of the basic/preclinical research on resurgence. To characterize the procedural and analytic methods used in basic/preclinical research on resurgence, we performed a systematic review consistent with PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses). We identified 120 articles consisting of 200 experiments that presented novel empirical research, examined operant behavior, and included standard elements of a resurgence procedure. We reported prevalence and trends in over 60 categories, including participant characteristics (e.g., species, sample size, disability), designs (e.g., single subject, group), procedural characteristics (e.g., responses, reinforcer types, control conditions), criteria defining resurgence (e.g., single test, multiple tests, relative to control), and analytic strategies (e.g., inferential statistics, quantitative analysis, visual inspection). We make some recommendations for future basic, preclinical, and clinical research based on our findings of this expanding literature.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40614-022-00361-y.

Response effort and resurgence

This study provides an initial translational examination of response effort and resurgence. Eleven typically developing adults and five adolescents with autism served as participants across two experiments. Participants received points for touching moving stimuli on a computer screen. The resurgence evaluation consisted of three phases: establishment wherein R1 was reinforced, elimination wherein R1 was placed on extinction while R2 was reinforced, and extinction wherein R1 and R2 no longer resulted in reinforcement. Rate of R1 during extinction was compared across three conditions: intermediate, easy, and difficult. Disparity in effort was created by manipulations of the size and speed of objects that moved about on a computer screen. In Experiment 2, control stimuli were added to the experimental arrangement. Across the two experiments, the magnitude of resurgence was greater when R1 was easy. In Experiment 2, both R1 and control responding were greater in the extinction phase than in the elimination phase in all conditions with all participants. The present study supports the hypothesis that response effort affects resurgence and that less effortful responses are likely to recur with greater magnitude under conditions that produce resurgence than are their more effortful counterparts.

Assessing human performance during contingency changes and extinction tests in reversal-learning tasks

Serial reversal-learning procedures are simple preparations that allow for a better understanding of how animals learn about environmental changes, including flexibly shifting responding to adapt to changing reinforcement contingencies. The present study examined serial reversal learning with humans by arranging both midsession and variable contingency reversals across two experiments. We also examined the effects of extinction by adding nonreinforced trials at the end of later sessions and provided the first evaluation of effects of win-stay/lose-shift versus counting strategies on accuracy and response latency of humans' reversal-learning performance. In each experiment, responding tracked contingency reversals, primarily with participants using either win-stay/lose-shift or counting strategies. Introducing variable reversal points in the second experiment resulted in near-exclusive win-stay/lose-shift responding among participants and eliminated counting of trials. Each experiment also revealed an immediate shift from S2 to S1 after experiencing extinction during the initial test trial, indicating resurgence of the initial response through a win-stay/lose-shift response pattern. Therefore, the present study replicates and extends prior findings of a win-stay/lose shift response pattern in situations of greater uncertainty. These findings suggest that differences in environmental certainty induce qualitatively different decision-making strategies.

Phase duration and resurgence

Resurgence, the recurrence of responding due to a worsening of reinforcement conditions for current behavior, is a prevalent form of treatment relapse. Resurgence as Choice in Context predicts that increasing the duration of exposure to reinforcement for target responding during Phase 1 will increase resurgence magnitude, whereas increasing the duration of exposure to reinforcement for alternative responding and extinction for target responding during Phase 2 will decrease resurgence magnitude. We conducted an experiment evaluating these predictions with human participants recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. We varied Phase 1 and Phase 2 durations across 4 experimental groups. Resurgence as Choice in Context successfully predicted the differences in resurgence magnitude across these groups, and fitting the quantitative model to the obtained data yielded an exceptional coefficient of determination. We discuss the implications of these results for using Resurgence as Choice in Context to inform experiments with human participants and the feasibility of using human-operant preparations to evaluate resurgence.

Examining effects of training duration on humans' resurgence and variability using a novel touchscreen procedure

Resurgence occurs when a previously reinforced and then extinguished target response increases due to reducing/eliminating an alternative source of reinforcement or punishing an alternative response. We evaluated whether duration of reinforcement history for a target response (1) affects the degree to which resurgence is observed in humans and (2) produces different gradients of response generalization around target responding during extinction testing. We arranged a novel touchscreen interface in which university students could swipe a 3D soccer ball to spin any direction. In Phase 1, the first direction swiped became the target and produced points exchangeable for money for 3 or 1 min across 2 groups. The first swipe was recorded but had no programmed consequence in a third group. In Phase 2, swipes 180-degrees from the target resulted in points for 3 min in all groups. Point deliveries ceased for 2 min to test for resurgence in Phase 3. Target responses resurged during testing to a relatively greater extent with longer Phase-1 training but gradients of response generalization did not differ among groups. These findings extend prior research on the role of training duration on resurgence. We discuss methodological and conceptual issues surrounding the assessment of response generalization in resurgence.

Evaluating Extinction, Renewal, and Resurgence of Operant Behavior in Humans with Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace providing researchers with the opportunity to collect behavioral data from remote participants at a low cost. Recent research demonstrated reliable extinction effects, as well as renewal and resurgence of button pressing with MTurk participants. To further examine the generality of these findings, we replicated and extended these methods across six experiments arranging reinforcement and extinction of a target button press. In contrast to previous findings, we did not observe as reliable of decreases in button pressing during extinction (1) after training with VR or VI schedules of reinforcement, (2) in the presence or absence of context changes, or (3) with an added response cost for button pressing. However, we found that that a 1-point response cost for all button presses facilitated extinction to a greater extent than the absence of response cost. Nevertheless, we observed ABA renewal of button pressing when changing background contexts across phases and resurgence when extinguishing presses on an alternative button. Our findings suggest that MTurk could be a viable platform from which to ask and address questions about extinction and relapse processes, but further procedural refinements will be necessary to improve the replicability of control by experimental 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.

Effects of response cost magnitude on resurgence of human operant behavior

Extensive research has been dedicated to the study of resurgence following extinction and differential reinforcement of alternative behavior. Less is known about the effects of punishment on resurgence. This study extended previous research by examining whether the magnitude of response cost punishment affects resurgence of human operant behavior. College students engaged in a computer task using the three-phase resurgence procedure where points were used to reinforce target (Phase 1) or alternative (Phase 2) behavior. Across three groups, Phase 2 contingencies for the target response were manipulated. In one group, only extinction was implemented. In the other two groups, response cost was also implemented. Response cost was equal to or double the number of points that could be gained for alternative responding. Resurgence was similar in Phase 3 across the three groups, demonstrating that neither the addition nor the magnitude of punishment differentially affected response recovery under these conditions. Future research should examine other parameters of punishment (e.g., delay, schedule) and how these variables interact with different parameters of alternative reinforcement to increase our understanding of the conditions under which resurgence may be exacerbated or minimized.

The control response in assessing resurgence: Useful or compromised tool?

Resurgence experiments sometimes include an operandum on which a history of reinforcement has not been experimentally established. The purpose of this control operandum is to rule out a generalized increase in responding when the alternative response is extinguished as being the cause of the resurgent target response. A review of the results of experiments conducted with both nonhumans and humans in which a control operandum was included shows that control- operandum responding is more common in the latter and almost nonexistent in the former. Both the presence and absence of responding on the control operandum, however, are subject to multiple interpretations thereby rendering it a compromised tool. Alternatives to using a control operandum to rule out extinction induction as the basis for resurgence include a preresurgence test control procedure and a differential resurgence procedure.

Resurgence in humans: Reducing relapse by increasing generalization between treatment and testing

Resurgence is the increase in performance of an extinguished instrumental (operant) response that accompanies the extinction of a response that has been reinforced to replace it. Resurgence may involve processes that are relevant for understanding relapse in applied and clinical settings. While resurgence is known to be a robust phenomenon in human operant extinction, the processes that control it remain unclear. Here we asked whether human resurgence is controlled by processes that are similar to those that have been identified in animals by asking whether two methods that reduce resurgence in animals also reduce it in humans. Participants first learned to make an operant response (R1) for a tangible food reinforcer (O1). In a second phase (Phase 2), R1 was extinguished while a second response (R2) was introduced and reinforced with a virtual monetary reward (USD $0.10 coins; O2). In a test phase, extinction was then introduced for R2 and resurgence of R1 was assessed. In Experiment 1, resurgence that occurred after the treatment just described was attenuated if there had been periodic exposure to R2 extinction during the treatment phase (Phase 2). In Experiment 2, resurgence was prevented when O2, but not O1, was presented noncontingently during the test. The results are among the first to suggest a mechanism underlying resurgence in humans, namely, renewal caused by contextual change. They also provide initial evidence to suggest that resurgence may be the result of common processes in animals and humans. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).