Effects of the number of acquisition sessions and scheduled reinforcers on ABA renewal

Recent research has suggested that among different relapse procedures (i.e. resurgence and renewal), an increased number of acquisition sessions contributes on observing a greater relapse. Even when such results seem to be consistent across studies, these can also be explained by attending to the number of scheduled reinforcers, since using different number of acquisition sessions could also result on differences in the number of scheduled reinforcers between groups. ABA renewal was assessed in four groups of rats by varying the number of acquisition sessions (12 and 4) or the number of scheduled reinforcers (240 and 720) between groups. As previous experiments, our results suggest that different number of acquisition sessions results on differences in ABA renewal; nevertheless, different number of obtained reinforcers seem to affect the degree to which renewal is observed. Therefore, it seems like renewal does not only depend upon the amount of training but also on the number of reinforcers obtained during acquisition.