Psychobiology

Research examining behavioral resistance to change has demonstrated that the extent to which food-reinforced responding is disrupted by events such as reducing the maintaining reinforcement schedule to extinction, deliver-ing response-independent food between multiple-schedule components, or prefeeding subjects prior to a session is dependent on baseline levels of reinforcement. Specifi-cally, the greater the level of reinforcement associated with responding in a component, the less that responding is disrupted relative to its baseline level (Harper, 1996