Semester

Fall

Date of Graduation

2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Psychology

Committee Chair

Kennon A. Lattal

Committee Member

Michael Perone

Committee Member

Claire St. Peter

Committee Member

Melissa Blank

Committee Member

Jodi Lindsey

Abstract

Resurgence, or the recurrence of a previously established but not currently occurring response given a worsening of current conditions, is a systematic phenomenon with clinical implications; thus, understanding the variables that impact resurgence is important. Investigations into the impact of discriminative stimuli on resurgence have yielded mixed results about whether the stimuli associated with extinction mitigate or prevent resurgence. The current experiments were conducted with sequential stimuli, that is, two or more stimuli occurring in a fixed sequence, that allowed determination of the effect of discriminative stimuli across a continuum of reinforcement conditions (from most temporally distal to most proximal to reinforcement). Experiment 1 investigated the effects of sequential stimuli on fixed- and variable-interval schedules of reinforcement. The patterns of responding under both schedules with the sequential stimuli were similar, with few responses occurring in the first half of the interreinforcer interval and an increasing response rate observed in the second half of the interval. Given this pattern, the initial stimuli in the sequence appear to function as discriminative stimuli for extinction and the last stimuli appear to function as discriminative stimuli for reinforcement. Thus, the sequential stimuli rather than time since the previous reinforcer controlled the pattern of responding. Experiment 2 was a resurgence experiment, with sequential stimuli reliably associated with alternative reinforcement. Resurgence reliably occurred in the initial segments, with stimuli associated with extinction, during the first resurgence tests. Following this, resurgence occurred in the last segments, when the stimuli previously associated with reinforcement were present. Thus, when both stimuli associated with reinforcement and extinction are present in the resurgence test phase, resurgence will occur during the context previously associated with extinction conditions first. Experiment 3 compared resurgence with and without discriminative stimuli using a multiple schedule of reinforcement for alternative responding (one component with sequential stimuli and one without). Resurgence, when it occurred, during this experiment, was unsystematic. However, stimuli associated with extinction do not appear to mitigate resurgence. Further, the present results suggest that sequential stimuli can be useful in controlling changes in responding across a continuum of reinforcement conditions. The applied relevance of these findings and potential limitations to the use of these procedures are discussed.

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