Association for Behavior Analysis International

Renewal refers to the return of a previously extinguished behavior followed by a context change (e.g., clinic to home). When the behavior is undesirable (e.g., aggression), renewal can threaten the durability of intervention effects. Therefore, it is particularly relevant to study renewal in applied populations given that context changes are often necessary for intervention generality and maintenance. The purpose of this symposium will be to review recent translational and applied investigations of renewal. This symposium will consist of four presentations followed by comments from Dr. Christopher Podlesnik. First, Dr. Alexis Pavlov will present an evaluation of contextual control during intervention for children with problem behavior maintained by automatic reinforcement. Second, Abigail Blackman will discuss an evaluation of renewal of desirable behavior in a simulated workplace with neurotypical adults. Third, Sarah Haney will present on a mitigation procedure for renewal of inappropriate mealtime behavior during intervention for pediatric feeding disorders. Fourth, Dr. Valdeep Saini will present a translational renewal evaluation and discuss implications of evaluating operant renewal in human subjects for theory and practice.

Practitioners, BCBAs, faculty, graduate students, researchers, and professionals

The reemergence of problem behavior after extinction during context changes is referred to as renewal. Estimates for the prevalence of renewal for problem behavior maintained by social reinforcement indicate that renewal occurs in approximately 42% of observed context changes (i.e., location or person; Muething et al., 2019). However, when examining the reemergence of automatically reinforced problem behavior during the same context changes, extinction may not be an active component of treatment, and therefore any increase in problem behavior cannot be classified as renewal. Rather, contextual control may better explain this phenomenon. In the absence of extinction, context changes could result in increases in the automatically reinforced problem behavior based on different learning histories in different contexts. For example, returning to a home context where the problem behavior was previously observed may result in an increase. This study examined 38 context changes in a consecutive controlled case-series design (Hagopian, Rooker, Jessel, & DeLeon, 2013) for children with automatically reinforced problem behavior in an intensive outpatient program. Reemergence of problem behavior during those context changes was found in 12 of the examined changes (31%).

Renewal is the increase in inappropriate behavior during extinction-based intervention when the intervention context changes. Renewal is likely to occur during intervention for inapapropriate mealtime behavior because children eat in many different contexts (e.g., home, school; Ibañez et al., 2019). In the current study, we tested for renewal and evaluated a renewal-mitigation procedure when we changed the context from a therapist to a caregiver as feeder and from the clinic to the home. We used an ABA arrangement to evaluate the efficacy of our mitigation procedure with 6 children with feeding disorders. We randomly assigned targets to the renewal or renewal-mitigation condition and randomly assigned the order of the renewal test. Context A was function-based reinforcement. Context B was function-based extinction during the renewal condition or function-based extinction with caregiver fading, context similarity, or both during the mitigation condition. The return to Context A was function-based extinction. We observed renewal in the renewal condition for 3 children, and our mitigation procedure prevented renewal in the mitigation condition for 3 children. We discuss the clinical implications of these results and directions for future research.