A quantitative analysis of the effects of alternative reinforcement rate and magnitude on resurgence

Resurgence occurs when a previously reinforced and then extinguished target response increases due to a worsening of reinforcement conditions for an alternative response. We conducted four crowdsourcing experiments to evaluate effects of alternative-reinforcer rate and magnitude on resurgence with humans. Contingent on an alternative response, we manipulated across groups either the rate of point delivery (Experiment 1) or number of points delivered per reinforcer (Experiments 2–3). Experiment 4 arranged combinations of high- or low-rate and high- or low-magnitude alternative reinforcement across four groups. When extinguishing alternative responding across experiments, we observed resurgence of target responding with relatively high rates of alternative reinforcement but differences in reinforcer magnitude did not influence resurgence. A quantitative model based on the concatenated matching law, Resurgence as Choice in Context (RaC2), provided a poor fit to the data, generally underpredicted target responding, and could not account for data from control groups experiencing extinction of target responding in the absence of alternative reinforcement. We then fit a modified version of RaC2 borrowing an assumption from theories of choice that suggest some proportion of reinforcers are misallocated between responses – this modified version of RaC2 provided a better account of these findings. •Examined effects of reinforcer rate and magnitude on resurgence through crowdsourcing.•In four experiments, greater reinforcer rates but not magnitudes increased resurgence.•We fit a quantitative model based on matching, Resurgence as Choice in Context (RaC2).•RaC2 fits improved when assuming reinforcers are misallocated between responses.•Misallocation also allowed RaC2 to be fit for the first time to simple extinction data.