Learning to stop responding

Abstract

Learning to stop responding is an important process that allows behavior to adapt to a changing and variable environment. This article reviews recent research in this laboratory and others that has studied how animals learn to stop responding in operant extinction, punishment, and feature-negative learning. Extinction and punishment are shown to be similar in two fundamental ways. First, the response-suppressing effects of both are highly context-specific. Second, the response-suppressing effects of both can be remarkably response-specific: Inhibition of one response transfers little to other responses. Learning to inhibit the response so specifically may result from the correction of "response error," the difference between the level of responding and what the current reinforcer supports. In contrast, the inhibition of responding that develops in feature-negative learning, where the response is reinforced during one discriminative stimulus (A) but not in a compound of A and stimulus B, is less response-specific: The inhibition of responding by stimulus B transfers and inhibits a second response, especially if the second response has itself been inhibited before. The results thus indicate both response-specific and response-general forms of behavioral inhibition. One possibility is that response-specific inhibition is learned when the circumstances encourage the organism to pay attention to the response-to what it is actually doing-as behavioral suppression is learned.

Keywords: Extinction; Feature-negative learning; Operant behavior; Punishment; Response inhibition.

Figure 1

Test results of Bouton et al. (2016), Experiment 2 Note. As explained in the text, extinction of SR1 (Group SR1) suppressed performance of R1 in the discriminative stimulus—but not R2. And Pavlovian extinction of S (Group S) had no effect on either response. From Bouton et al. (2016). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Figure 2

Results of Bouton et al. (2020), Experiment 1 Note. Results of an experiment that confirmed a role for response error (as opposed to stimulus error) in discriminated operant extinction (Bouton et al.’s (2020) concurrent excitor experiment). See text and Table 3 for further explanation. Left, final single-element extinction trials with BR1 and CR2. Middle, responding during compound (ABC) extinction trials. Right, response rates during tests of BR1 and CR2. Lower responding on BR1 compared to CR2 indicates the effect of response error during the compound extinction phase. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Figure 3

Results of Broomer and Bouton (2023), Experiment 1a Note. Lever-press data for each stage of training and test in Broomer and Bouton (2023), Experiment 1a. Left, acquisition of lever pressing in Context A. Middle, effects of the response elimination treatments in Context B. Full recovery of Yoked group responding indicates that response suppression in the Punished group was due to the response-shock contingency. At test (right), Punished and Extinguished groups exhibited nearly identical degrees of ABA renewal. From Broomer and Bouton, 2023. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Figure 4

Test results of Steinfeld and Bouton (2022), Experiment 1 Note. Test data from Steinfeld and Bouton (2022), Experiment 1. A) In the inhibitor test, feature-negative inhibitors B and D were equally effective in suppressing the responses with which they were trained (i.e., BR1, DR2) as well as the “wrong” responses (i.e., BR2, DR1). B) In the compound test, B and D similarly suppressed both responses when presented in compound with the respective excitors (i.e., ABR1, ADR1, CBR2, CDR1). C) In the excitor test, excitatory cues A and C selectively occasioned R1 and R2, respectively, albeit with significant cross-response transfer. See text and Table 5 for further explanation.