A comparison of two behaviour reduction procedures: traditional extinction alone and interpolated reinforcement followed by extinction.

This article presents a study where extinction responding of children with severe retardation was compared when one component of a multiple schedule was interpolated with one session of additional reinforcement. The process of extinction has an important role in the learning theory. A variety of competing accounts of extinction have been developed in terms of inferred processes such as inhibition, frustration, interference and fatigue. These accounts argued that responding did not merely decline passively in extinction but were actively suppressed. An operant account assumes that extinction is not a special process and that the return of responding lo baseline levels merely demonstrate that the effects of reinforcement are temporary.