Behavioural Processes
Behavioural Processes
5 years ago

Spacing Extinction Sessions as a Behavioral Technique for Preventing Relapse in an Animal Model of Voluntary Actions

Instrumental extinction has been proposed as a model for understanding the suppression of problematic voluntary actions. Consequently, it has been suggested that response recovery after extinction could model relapse. Four experiments with rats used a free operant procedure to explore the impact of spacing extinction sessions on spontaneous recovery, renewal, reinstatement, and rapid reacquisition of extinguished lever-pressing. Initially, in all experiments, hungry rats were trained to perform two responses (R1 and R2) for food. Then, all responses underwent extinction. For R1, rats experienced a longer intersession interval (72 h) than for R2 (24 h). During the final restoration test, it was observed that using spaced extinction sessions reduced spontaneous recovery, renewal, and reinstatement. However, implementing a longer intersession interval throughout extinction exposure did not slow the rate of reacquisition of operant responses. The present findings suggest that in most cases extinction is more enduring when the extinction sessions are spaced. Since expanding the intersession interval during extinction might be interpreted as conducting extinction in multiple temporal contexts, the overall pattern of results was explained based on contextual modulation.

Publisher URL: www.sciencedirect.com/science

DOI: S0376635717304783

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.