Christopher A Podlesnik

• PhD, BCBA-D
• Professor (Associate) at University of Florida

Resurgence is defined as an increase in a previously reinforced and reduced target response when conditions worsen for a more recently reinforced alternative response. The present experiment evaluated the effects of target‐ and alternative‐reinforcer rate on resurgence in humans. We arranged combinations of contingent high‐ and low‐rate target and...

Several studies have examined the prevalence of behavioral relapse among individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities following common treatment challenges (context changes, schedule thinning). Most applied studies compare behavior during the treatment challenges with the maximum level of behavior from five preceding treatment sessi...

Resurgence is defined as an increase in a previously extinguished target response ( B 1 ) resulting from the worsening of conditions for a more recently reinforced alternative response ( B 2 ). Worsening includes extinction or reductions in rate, amount, and immediacy of delivery of food or some other phylogenetically important event (PIE). In the...

Resurgence can be defined as increases in previously reinforced and subsequently extinguished target responding when conditions for an alternative response worsen. Worsening of alternative conditions, such as extinction, has been linked to relapse of clinically relevant behavior. Preclinical researchers have evaluated whether punishing target respo...

We assessed whether novel praise statements could be used to (a) maintain and increase responses with existing reinforcement histories and (b) teach a previously untaught response among children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder across two experiments. During response–stimulus pairing, two responses resulted in preferred edibles but only one...

Functional communication training (FCT) is an evidence‐based treatment for behavior targeted for reduction that often combines extinction for target responses and arranges functionally equivalent reinforcement for alternative behavior. Long‐term effectiveness of FCT can become compromised when transitioning from clinic to nonclinic contexts or thin...

The relapse of challenging behavior poses a serious threat to the long-term effectiveness of behavioral interventions. Moreover, relapse can significantly impact an individual’s quality of life and ability to be a productive member of society. As a result, clinical relapse has inspired laboratory research that models, isolates, and investigates the...

Researchers in social sciences increasingly rely on crowdsourcing marketplaces such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and Prolific to facilitate rapid, low-cost data collection from large samples. However, crowdsourcing suffers from high attrition, threatening the validity of crowdsourced studies. Separate studies have demonstrated that (1) higher...

Zebrafish show social behavior such as shoaling and schooling, which is a result of complex and interdependent interactions among conspecifics. Zebrafish social behavior is interdependent in the sense that one fish’s behavior affects both conspecific behavior and, as a result, their own behavior. Previous research examined effects of the interdepen...

Resurgence is the increase in a previously reinforced and then extinguished target response due to changes in reinforcement conditions for an alternative response, including reductions in the rate or magnitude of reinforcement for the alternative response. Research with nonhumans suggests that reductions in both alternative-reinforcer rate and magn...

Unlabelled: 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 pr...

Resurgence and renewal are relapse phenomena in which behavior undergoing extinction returns as a result of worsening of reinforcement conditions or changes in environmental context, respectively. The present experiments examined laboratory models of resurgence and renewal in isolation and in combination to assess the potential influences of these...

Resurgence occurs when a previously reinforced and then extinguished target response increases due to a worsening of reinforcement conditions for an alternative response. We conducted four crowdsourcing experiments to evaluate effects of alternative-reinforcer rate and magnitude on resurgence with humans. Contingent on an alternative response, we m...

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 conting...

Resurgence occurs when a worsening of conditions for an alternative response (e.g., extinction) increases a previously reinforced and subsequently extinguished target response. In contrast, renewal is an increase in a response previously eliminated by extinction following a contextual change. Moreover, arranging contextual changes during resurgence...

Laboratory models of relapse provide methods for evaluating challenges to behavioral treatments with differential reinforcement of an alternative response (DRA). Resurgence occurs with the worsening of conditions of reinforcement for appropriate behavior and renewal occurs when transitioning out of a treatment context. Across five experiments, part...

Increases in behavior due to context changes are common and are known as instances of renewal. Clinically relevant examples from the literature highlighting renewal often include socially mediated problem behaviors. This report retrospectively analyzed data during context changes for individuals who engaged in problem behavior maintained by automat...

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)...

Behavioral flexibility has, in part, been defined by choice behavior changing as a function of changes in reinforcer payoffs. We examined whether the generalized matching law quantitatively described changes in choice behavior in zebrafish when relative reinforcer rates, delays/immediacy, and magnitudes changed between two alternatives across condi...

Nonhuman animal models show that reinforcers control behavior through what they signal about the likelihood of future events, but such control is generally imperfect. Imperfect control by the relation between past and likely future events may result from imperfect detection of those events as they occur, which result in imperfect detection of the r...

This is the draft of an article submitted for publication of a tutorial with a demonstration experiment to study operant behavior with crowdsourcing. We describe in detail the procedures used in our research on extinction and relapse of operant behavior recruiting participants through Amazon Mechanical Turk (Ritchey et al., 2021, Learning & Motivat...

A previously reinforced and then extinguished response can recur following a change in the environmental context despite extinction remaining in effect, often referred to as renewal. Using zebrafish, the present study examined how adding a punishment contingency to the training context affected the level of renewal. In Context A, responding was rei...

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...

Antecedent- and consequence-based procedures decrease errors during conditional discrimination training but are not typically guided by error patterns. A framework based in behavioral-choice and signal-detection theory can quantify error patterns due to (1) biases for certain stimuli or locations and (2) discriminability of stimuli within the condi...

We examined the effects of the presence and absence of punishment on the resurgence and renewal of extinguished operant behavior with zebrafish. With resurgence, food deliveries reinforced target responding in Phase 1 was exposed to shock punishment plus extinction (PUN + EXT) versus extinction alone (EXT) while introducing alternative reinforcemen...

Researchers have examined preference for the format of delivery of feedback, however little research has examined strategies to increase feedback and praise desirability. The current study aimed to evaluate whether preference shifted for stimuli that signaled work and for manager-praise stimuli that were delivered after work. Moreover, we sought to...

Differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO) is a procedure often used to decrease problem behavior, but the processes responsible for behavior reduction are not well understood. This study assessed whether adventitious reinforcement of other behavior contributes to DRO effectiveness when, relative to previous research, DRO exposure is prolon...

Resurgence is the reoccurrence of a target response when reinforcement for a more recently reinforced alternative response is eliminated or reduced. The present study arranged two successive three-phase procedures to assess whether resurgence decreases with repeated assessments. Moreover, we arranged a contextual change from the first to second ass...

Differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO) is commonly used to decrease problem behavior by presenting reinforcers contingent upon the absence of a target response. Although it is well demonstrated that DROs decrease response rates, the processes producing these decreases are not well understood. The present study systematically replicated...

It is widely assumed that reinforcers are biologically relevant stimuli, or stimuli that have been associated with biologically relevant stimuli. However, brief, arbitrary stimuli have also been reported to have reinforcement‐like effects, despite being unrelated to biologically relevant stimuli like food. The present study explored the potential r...

In two laboratory experiments, we examined whether stimuli paired with alternative reinforcers could mitigate resurgence of a previously reinforced target response with pigeons (Experiment 1) and children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (Experiment 2). In Phase 1, we arranged food reinforcement according to a variable-ratio schedule for eng...

Treatments based on differential reinforcement may inadvertently increase the recurrence of problem behavior in the face of challenges because reinforcers for appropriate behavior occur in the same context as problem behavior. The current study evaluated one potential approach to mitigating these problems with differential reinforcement treatments...

We introduce to behavior analysis a way of analyzing choice behavior that exploits recent developments in nanoeconomics, financial economics, and econometrics. A response return, modeled on an economic return, is the log differenced count of responses allocated to each of two alternatives during a short time window, compared with that in the immedi...

The present study examined whether resurgence of a previously reinforced target response upon removing alternative reinforcement would be greater when (1) returning to the original training context (ABA context changes) versus (2) remaining in the analogue treatment context in which the alternative response was differentially reinforced (ABB contex...

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) are a promising animal model for studying the effects of gene–environment interactions on behavior. Two experiments were conducted to assess punishment effects of presenting predator videos (Indian leaf fish; Nandus nandus) and electric shock on operant approach responses in zebrafish. In Experiment 1, the predator video and...

Resurgence is defined as the recurrence of a previously reinforced and then extinguished target response when reducing or eliminating a more recently reinforced alternative response. In experiments with children and pigeons, we evaluated patterns of resurgence across and within sessions through decreases in reinforcer availability by challenging al...

Behavioral treatments arranging differential reinforcement effectively treat severe problem behavior while interventions are underway. However, many events challenge these treatments clinically, thereby producing relapse of problem behavior. This paper reviews six laboratory models of treatment relapse for their relevance to understanding the proce...

The study and use of punishment in behavioral treatments has been constrained by ethical concerns. However, there remains a need to reduce harmful behavior unable to be reduced by differential‐reinforcement procedures. We investigated whether response‐contingent presentation of a negative discriminative stimulus previously correlated with an absenc...

Resurgence is the reemergence of a previously reinforced response that occurs after the elimination or reduction of reinforcement for an alternative response. Resurgence is problematic in the context of treatment because the reemergence of a previously reinforced destructive response could be detrimental to treatment gains. In the current translati...

An experiment with humans was conducted to assess the relative effects of reinforcement and punishment on choice. Point gains and losses were programmed as reinforcers and punishers, respectively. Participants used a mouse to click two buttons on a computer screen while the ratio of point gains was varied according to a concurrent variable-interval...

Resurgence and reinstatement are laboratory models of relapse following treatments for problem behavior that arrange alternative sources of reinforcement, such as differential reinforcement of alternative behavior and noncontingent reinforcement. Resurgence models the elimination or reduction of reinforcers during treatment and reinstatement models...

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,...

Differential-reinforcement treatments reduce target problem behavior in the short term but at the expense of making it more persistent long term. Basic and translational research based on behavioral momentum theory suggests that combining features of stimuli governing an alternative response with the stimuli governing target responding could make t...

Zebrafish are a widely used animal model in biomedical research, as an alternative to mammals, for having features such as a fully sequenced genome, high fecundity, and low-cost maintenance, but behavioral research with these fish remains scarce. The present study investigated whether zebrafish could be a new animal model for studies on the relapse...

Behavioral treatment gains established in one setting do not always maintain in other settings. The present review examines the relevance of basic and translational research to understanding failures to maintain treatment gains across settings. Specifically, studies of the renewal effect examine how transitioning away from a treatment setting could...

Zebrafish are used extensively as vertebrate animal models in biomedical research for having such features as a fully sequenced genome and transparent embryo. Yet, operant-conditioning studies with this species are scarce. The present study investigated reversal learning and resurgence of operant behavior in zebrafish. A target response (approachin...

Basic and translational research provides the opportunity to evaluate variables that may be difficult to examine thoroughly with clinical populations. For example, practitioners report that problem behavior treated with differential reinforcement of alternative behavior (DRA) is often prone to treatment relapse. We sought to assess resurgence in th...

Noncontingent reinforcement is a commonly used procedure to decrease levels of problem behavior. Goals of this intervention are to decrease motivation, responding, and the functional relation between behavior and consequences, but it could also possibly compete with performance of alternative desirable responses. In the current study, we assessed t...

We review quantitative accounts of behavioral momentum theory (BMT), its application to clinical treatment, and its extension to post-intervention relapse of target behavior. We suggest that its extension can account for relapse using reinstatement and renewal models, but that its application to resurgence is flawed both conceptually and in its fai...

The aim of this study was to quantify 1647 aversion training sessions involving 1156 dogs conducted between 1998 and 2007 at Coromandel sites (North Island, New Zealand). The effects of gender, age, social group size, function of dog, breed, number of training sessions and responses to training were explored for evidence of learning differences. Th...

Individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other developmental disabilities are at risk of engaging in severe problem behavior, including aggression and self-injury. Severe problem behavior is an obstacle to proper education and integration into society. Therefore, eliminating severe problem behavior is key to long-term academic...

After a functional analysis yielded undifferentiated results, a subsequent assessment suggested self-injury exhibited by a young boy with autism was sensitive to physical restraint. Canvas arm splints with metal stays were initially effective to reduce self-injury. Although we successfully faded the number of stays in each sleeve to 3, self-injury...

The baseline rate of a reinforced target response decreases with the availability of response-independent sources of alternative reinforcement; however, resistance to disruption and relapse increases. Because many behavioral treatments for problem behavior include response-dependent reinforcement of alternative behavior, the present study assessed...

Resurgence is the recurrence of a previously reinforced and then extinguished behavior induced by the extinction of another more recently reinforced behavior. Resurgence provides insight into behavioral processes relevant to treatment relapse of a range of problem behaviors. Resurgence is typically studied across three phases: (1) reinforcement of...

Differential reinforcement of alternative behavior (DRA) is a treatment designed to eliminate problem behavior by reinforcing an alternative behavior at a higher rate. Availability of alternative reinforcement may be signaled, as with Functional Communication Training, or unsignaled. Whether or not alternative reinforcement is signaled could influe...

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 behav...

Behavioral momentum theory is a quantitative framework asserting that reinforcers obtained in the presence of a discriminative-stimulus context govern the persistence of behavior, as defined as resistance to disruption and relapse. An important implication of the theory is that behavioral treatments that decrease problem behavior by arranging alter...

Behavioral treatments for problem behavior arranging differential reinforcement can result in relapse due to a range of conditions. Basic research using nonhuman animal models in particular is useful because relevant behavioral processes can be revealed through systematic research that is impossible or unethical in clinical situations. Because rela...

Context renewal is the relapse of an extinguished response due to changing the stimulus context following extinction. Reinforcing operant responding in Context A and extinguishing in Context B results in relapse when either returning to Context A (ABA renewal) or introducing a novel Context C (ABC renewal). ABA renewal consistently is greater than...

Behavior reduced as a consequence of extinction or intervention can relapse. According to behavioral momentum theory, the extent to which behavior persists and relapses once it has been eliminated depends on the relative training reinforcement rate among discriminative stimuli. In addition, studies of context renewal reveal that relapse depends on...

Reinforcing an alternative response in the presence of the stimuli governing a target response increases resistance to extinction of target responding, relative to training target responding on its own. Conversely, training alternative and target responses in the presence of different stimuli and combining those stimuli only decreases resistance to...

We investigated why violations to the constant-ratio rule, an assumption of the generalized matching law, occur in procedures that arrange frequent changes to reinforcer ratios. Our investigation produced steady-state data and compared them with data from equivalent, frequently changing procedures. Six pigeons responded in a four-alternative concur...

Treatment relapse, defined as the reemergence of problem behavior after treatment, is a serious difficulty faced by clinicians. Failures of treatment integrity (i.e., failure to implement interventions as intended) are often invoked to explain the reemergence of problem behavior. Basic studies suggest that the prevailing stimulus context might also...

Behavioral momentum theory (BMT) is a quantitative model used to describe the persistence of behavior in the face of varying challenges (e.g., extinction, distraction). Generally, BMT predicts that responses that occur under stimulus conditions associated with denser reinforcement will persist in the face of challenges to a greater extent than resp...

Behavioral momentum theory asserts Pavlovian stimulus–reinforcer relations govern the persistence of operant behavior. Specifically, resistance to conditions of disruption (e.g., extinction, satiation) reflects the relation between discriminative stimuli and the prevailing reinforcement conditions. The present study assessed whether Pavlovian stimu...

Resurgence is the relapse of a previously reinforced and then extinguished target response when extinguishing a more recently reinforced alternative response. We designed the present study to assess the contribution of stimulus-control and reinforcer-control processes in determining resurgence. In a modified resurgence procedure, we removed the alt...

Although drugs may serve as reinforcers or punishers of operant behavior, the punishing function has received much less experimental attention than the reinforcing function. A sensitive method for studying drug-induced punishment is to assess choice for a punished response over an unpunished response. In these experiments, rats chose between pressi...

Behavioral momentum theory asserts that preference and relative resistance to disruption depend on reinforcement rates and provide converging expressions of the conditioned value of discriminative stimuli. However, preference and resistance to disruption diverge when assessing preference during brief extinction probes. We expanded upon this opposin...

Reinforcing an alternative response in the same context as a target response reduces the rate of occurrence but increases the persistence of that target response. Applied researchers who use such techniques to decrease the rate of a target problem behavior risk inadvertently increasing the persistence of the same problem behavior. Behavioral moment...

Behavioral momentum theory provides a framework for understanding how conditions of reinforcement influence instrumental response strength under conditions of disruption (i.e., resistance to change). The present experiment examined resistance to change of divided-attention performance when different overall probabilities of reinforcement were arran...

The synthetic nonpeptide NOP (nociceptin/orphanin FQ peptide) receptor agonist Ro 64-6198 produces antinociception in rhesus monkeys. In rodents, it has much more variable effects on pain responses, but has response rate-increasing effects on punished operant behavior and decreases drug reward. The aim of this study was to compare Ro 64-6198 with t...

According to behavioral momentum theory, preference and relative resistance to change in concurrent-chains schedules are correlated and reflect the relative conditioned value of discriminative stimuli. In the present study, we explore the generality of this relation by manipulating the temporal context within a concurrent-chains procedure through c...

We assessed the effects of repeated extinction and reversals of two conditional stimuli (CS+/CS-) on an appetitive conditioned approach response in rats. Three results were observed that could not be accounted for by a simple linear operator model such as the one proposed by Rescorla and Wagner (1972): (1) responding to a CS- declined faster when a...

The goal of this series of experiments was to develop an operant choice procedure to examine rapidly the punishing effects of intravenous drugs in rats. First, the cardiovascular effects of experimenter-administered intravenous histamine, a known aversive drug, were assessed to determine a biologically active dose range. Next, rats responded on eac...

Previous experiments on behavioral momentum have shown that relative resistance to extinction of operant behavior in the presence of a discriminative stimulus depends upon the baseline rate or magnitude of reinforcement associated with that stimulus (i.e., the Pavlovian stimulus-reinforcer relation). Recently, we have shown that relapse of operant...

Previous experiments on behavioral momentum have shown that relative resistance to extinction of operant behavior in the presence of a stimulus depends on the rate of reinforcement associated with that stimulus, even if some of those reinforcers occur independently of the behavior. We present three experiments examining whether the rate of reinforc...

Stimuli uncorrelated with reinforcement have been shown to enhance response rates and resistance to disruption; however, the effects of different rates of stimulus presentations have not been assessed. In two experiments, we assessed the effects of adding different rates of response-dependent brief stimuli uncorrelated with primary reinforcement on...

Previous studies with concurrent-chains procedures have shown that preference for a terminal-link signaling a higher reinforcement rate decreases as initial-link durations increase. Using a concurrent-chains procedure, the present experiment examined the effects of manipulating initial-link duration on preference and resistance to disruption with r...

In previous research on resistance to change, differential disruption of operant behavior by satiation has been used to assess the relative strength of responding maintained by different rates or magnitudes of the same reinforcer in different stimulus contexts. The present experiment examined resistance to disruption by satiation of one reinforcer...

We review recent experiments examining whether simple models of the allocation and persistence of operant behavior are applicable to attending. In one series of experiments, observing responses of pigeons were used as an analog of attending. Maintenance of observing is often attributed to the conditioned reinforcing effects of a food-correlated sti...

Three experiments examined the effects of conditioned reinforcement value and primary reinforcement rate on resistance to change using a multiple schedule of observing-response procedures with pigeons. In the absence of observing responses in both components, unsignaled periods of variable-interval (VI) schedule food reinforcement alternated with e...

Behavioral momentum theory suggests that the relation between a response and a reinforcer (i.e., response-reinforcer relation) governs response rates and the relation between a stimulus and a reinforcer (i.e., stimulus-reinforcer relation) governs resistance to change. The present experiments compared the effects degrading response-reinforcer relat...

Previously, we have shown that changes in pigeons' divided attention performance resulting from changes in relative reinforcement are well described by the generalized matching law. In the present experiment, we examined whether sensitivity of performance to variations in relative reinforcement would be dependent upon sample duration. Pigeons respo...

This experiment examined the applicability of the generalized matching law to changes in divided-attention performance produced by variations in relative reinforcement rate. Pigeons were exposed to a delayed matching-to-sample procedure in which compound samples (color + line orientation) and element comparisons (two colors or two line orientations...

Several research laboratories have found that instructed behavior can be less sensitive to changes in contingencies than shaped behavior. The current experiment examined whether these differences in sensitivity could be related to resistance to change. Two groups of subjects, who were matched on the basis of an initial disruption assessment, were e...