Response-specific effects of punishment of a discriminated operant response

To determine whether the punishment of a discriminated operant behavior has effects that are specific to the punished response, rats were reinforced for performing two different instrumental responses (lever pressing and chain pulling) in the presence of a single discriminative stimulus (S). They were then either punished with mild footshock for performing one of the responses (R1) in S, or they received the same shocks in a noncontingent manner while performing R1 in S (i.e., a yoked control). In final tests of both R1 and R2 in S, the punished rats were more suppressed to R1 than R2, but the yoked rats were not. The results extend previous results with extinction rather than punishment learning (Bouton, Trask, & Carranza-Jasso, 2016) and support a larger parallel between extinction and punishment of both free-operant and discriminated-operant responding. Punishment is like extinction in creating a response-specific inhibition of either free or discriminated operant behavior.