Separate and combined effects of operant ABA renewal mitigation strategies

Abstract

Due to the undesirable effects of operant renewal for behavioral interventions, recent research has advocated for the advancement of renewal mitigation strategies. One strategy includes the use of extinction cues, which are stimuli used to establish discriminative control over responding in the second context that are subsequently transferred to the initial context. A second strategy involves context fading, which refers to progressively increasing the similarity between the second context and the initial context. The current study evaluated the separate and combined effects of these techniques using a preclinical human laboratory arrangement. Participants were exposed to the extinction cue strategy, the context fading strategy, both strategies, or neither strategy during a three-phase ABA renewal procedure using differential reinforcement of an alternative response combined with extinction. The results indicated that context fading or combining context fading with an extinction cue was effective at mitigating renewal. The use of an extinction cue alone reduced renewal relative to the control group, but this difference was not statistically significant. The results are discussed in terms of methodological and theoretical differences across strategies as well as implications for future research on renewal mitigation strategies.