EVALUATING THE EFFECTS OF CONTINUOUS VS. PARTIAL REINFORCEMENT ON EXTINCTION PERFORMANCE IN THE HUMAN LABORATORY

Abstract

Recent human-laboratory analyses of extinction performance have demonstrated a lack of sensitivity of human behavior to extinction contingencies. The current experiment aimed to evaluate whether arranging high (continuous reinforcement, CRF) vs. low (partial reinforcement, PRF) rates of reinforcement for human behavior in the laboratory affected extinction performance. Five adults pressed buttons for point reinforcers in two laboratory visits. During each visit, button pressing produced reinforcers for ten, 2-min baseline sessions after which pressing was placed onextinction for twenty, 2-min sessions. During one visit (the CRF condition), every press to a target button resulted in points in baseline. During the other (the PRF condition), target-button pressing produced points according to a variable-interval 10-s schedule in baseline. Button pressing tended to persist across sessions of extinction, but it persisted more in the PRF condition than in the CRF condition for most participants. Extinction also was associated with elevated levels of pressing to inactive buttons that were never associated with reinforcement. Additional work is needed to better understand why human behavior persists during extinction when evaluated in laboratory settings.