Contextual renewal of an instrumental response supressed by punishment: An online study

Abstract

A change in the extinction context´s characteristics produces the reappearance of the extinct behavior, is known as contextual renewal. This experiment explored the contextual renewal of a previously extinguished response using a punishment procedure. The participants solved a virtual task in which they acquired two operant responses in Phase 1 (Training). Subsequently, all the participants received a pu-nishment procedure (Decrement) to eliminate response 1 (R1), while response 2 (R2) continued to receive reinforcement. One of the groups (ABA) was trained in context A and was punished in context B, while the other group (AAA) remained in the same context throughout both phases. During the test in context A, it was observed that the change in the context during punishment phase only affected R1 showing contextual renewal. These results extend the findings observed in animals to human participants, they are consistent with the contextual renewal observed in other response-decreasing procedures.