Assessing the role of alternative response rates and reinforcer rates in resistance to extinction of target responding when combining stimuli.

Studies of behavioral momentum reveal that reinforcing an alternative response in the presence of a target response reduces the rate of target responding but increases its persistence, relative to training the target response on its own. Because of the parallels between these studies and differential-reinforcement techniques to reduce problem behavior in clinical settings, alternative techniques to reduce problem behavior without enhancing its persistence are being explored. One potential solution is to train an alternative response in a separate stimulus context from problem behavior before combining the alternative stimulus with the target stimulus. The present study assessed how differences in reinforcement contingencies and rate for alternative responding influenced resistance to extinction of target responding when combining alternative and target stimuli in pigeons. Across three experiments, alternative stimuli signaling a response-reinforcer dependency and greater reinforcer rates more effectively decreased the persistence of target responding when combining alternative and target stimuli within the same extinction tests, but not when compared across separate extinction tests. Overall, these findings reveal that differences in competition between alternative and target responding produced by contingencies of alternative reinforcement could influence the effectiveness of treating problem behavior through combining stimulus contexts.