Resurgence in a discrete-trial procedure in rats

Resurgence is a transient recovery of a previously extinguished target response following a worsening of reinforcement conditions for an alternative response. Laboratory studies with nonhuman animals typically assess resurgence in free-operant situations where subjects can freely emit responses. The purpose of the current study was to investigate whether resurgence would be observed in a discrete-trial procedure where only a single response could occur in each trial, using rats as subjects. The experiment consisted of three phases, and each session ended after 200 trials. All trials began with the insertion of target and alternative levers and ended once a response was emitted. In Phase 1, both target and alternative responses were reinforced with a probability of .25. In Phase 2, the target response was extinguished while still reinforcing the alternative response with a probability of .25. Finally, resurgence was tested by placing the alternative response on extinction. All rats showed robust resurgence in this highly constrained discrete-trial situation. We also found that the latencies of resurged target responses differed from those in Phase 1. Overall, the present discrete-trial procedure could produce reliable resurgence as with typical free-operant procedures and has several potential benefits for studying resurgence.