Association for Behavior Analysis International

This talk will review research from the basic learning laboratory on extinction and other methods that weaken or reduce behavior. When a behavior has been suppressed by extinction, punishment, DRO, or DRA, it can recover or “renew” when the context is changed. Behavioral inhibition is thus generally context-dependent. Importantly, there are also many kinds of “contexts:” In addition to physical background cues, drug state, and time, recent experiments have established a contextual role for hunger and satiety states, stress state, recent reinforcers (as in reinstatement and resurgence), and preceding behaviors in a behavior chain. Recent research has also explored what is learned in operant extinction and how it is actually learned. The findings have implications for understanding and preventing lapse and relapse after behavioral inhibition and behavior change.

Researchers and practitioners that want a deeper understanding of extinction and behavior change

Mark E. Bouton, Ph.D., is a University Distinguished Professor and the Lawson Green and Gold Professor of Psychology at the University of Vermont. He has been doing research on the effects of context on conditioning and learning, with an emphasis on behavior change, for several decades. He has received a number of awards, including the Gantt Medal from the Pavlovian Society and the Quad-L Award from the University of New Mexico, and he is a Fellow of several organizations, including the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Eastern Psychological Association, of which he is a past president. He is also the author of a well-regarded textbook on learning and behavior theory [Learning and behavior: A contemporary synthesis (2nd ed.)], published in 2016 by Sinauer Associates, an imprint of Oxford University Press.