 Hey everyone, welcome back. It's Veronica Howard. So I want to talk about the difference between punishment, especially punishment by contingent withdrawal and extinction. Both punishment and extinction are behavior deceleration techniques, which means that they decrease the rate of a response. They make a behavior slow down or disappear entirely. And these can be really, really confusing for people, especially that distinction between punishment by contingent withdrawal or negative punishment where stimulus is removed following behavior and extinction where reinforcers permanently stop following behavior. So let's get into it. Remember negative punishment or as Miller calls it punishment by contingent withdrawal is a temporary withdrawal of a stimulus of reinforcing value following behavior. Now what's important there is that it's a stimulus of reinforcing value. It does not mean that the stimulus is the reinforcer for the target behavior. Instead, it's something else that has value, but it's not necessarily tied to the behavior that it's being removed contingent on. For instance, when I speed in my car, which you know, knock on wood, I don't or knock on wood again, I don't get caught. If you're speeding and you get a speeding ticket, typically the result is that there's going to be a cash fine. It can be if you're particularly speedy and you get caught multiple times, you could lose your license. But in that case, the money that's being removed, contingent on your speeding is not the reason that you were speeding. People typically speed because maybe they're short on time, maybe they're trying to get someplace really fast, maybe they're trying to escape or avoid the unpleasant drive. What I'm getting at here is the money that's being removed is not the reinforcer for driving fast. So you're not withholding a reinforcer for the target behavior of speeding. You're withholding a different stimulus of reinforcing value, but not the reinforcer for this behavior contingent on getting caught. You want to compare and contrast this with extinction. Extinction is the permanent stopping. And I'm going to do a little, you know, asterisk, air quote, the permanent stopping of a reinforcer that maintains response. And I do say it's the permanent stopping because if you're doing extinction with fidelity, you should be, you know, wholesale across the board, stop that reinforcer, maintain the behavior. But we know that sometimes people do not implement extinction with fidelity. So you want to watch for that because it is one of the potential ways in which we can mess up extinction. Let's do a couple of examples. For instance, mama started taking away Billy's TV privileges for a day if she sees him playing a computer game during study time. So it takes away the TV if he's caught doing computer games during study. Billy's rate of game playing during study time has decreased. Is this withdrawal of a stimulus of reinforcing value? Is this negative punishment? Or is this excuse me, extinction? Well, this is probably negative punishment. This is punishment by contingent withdrawal because the reinforcer that's being removed, the stimulus of reinforcing value is watching TV. Watching TV is not the reinforcer for playing games. So watching TV does not reinforce studying and it doesn't reinforce playing games. It's totally unrelated. It's something that's not related to the scenario at all. And the removal of TV is temporary. So she's only taking the TV privileges away for a day. If this were extinction, we want to see that reinforcer just permanently stopped. Let's do another one. Mom's going to, however, rig the computer so Billy can't play games during study time. She's going to install an app that prevents it from actually booting up the game anytime he tries to play it. Is this closer to extinction or is this punishment? In this case, this is probably extinction because the reinforcer in this case is actually playing the game. You click on the app, you get it to load up and the reinforcer for going through those steps are access to the video game. But she's blocking it. So now no matter how many times you click on that app, no matter how many times you click on that desktop icon, it's not going to load up that game. So the computer is never going to allow Billy to play that video game during study time. And so we would probably say that this reinforcer has been permanently withdrawn during that period of time and we'll come back and we'll talk about some advanced conceptual stuff like discrimination training and under what circumstances you can play it versus not. But this is probably closer to extinction because it's permanent and it's targeting the reinforcer for that behavior. It's preventing him from getting access to the game. Would you like to do another example? All right, let's do another example. This one's a little bit risque. So if you're uncomfortable with talking about things of a romantic or sexual nature, go ahead and stop the video. But we've all been there, right? So two people just broke up. Toby and Sam just broke up. Sam keeps texting Toby to ask you to get back together. Toby is ignoring the messages and Sam eventually stops texting. Is this punishment or is this extinction? This one's probably a little bit easier because when people think about extinction, they think about not paying attention to a behavior. But remember, extinction is only the same as ignoring if attention is the behavior. In this case, not responding to those text messages shuts down the possibility of getting back together. So in this case, I think we're looking at the reinforcer being Toby's reply to the messages or maybe starting that relationship again. But Sam is just completely shutting that down. Or excuse me, Toby's shutting that down. So Sam eventually stops trying. Toby never replies to those messages. This reinforcer, that reinforcer is never going to be applied. This is probably closer to extinction. As opposed to, say, same couple, Sam sends Toby a kind of photo that sometimes we send to people that were uncommitted relationships with and Toby completely ignores Sam for a day. Sam is less likely to send those photos to Toby in the future. Is this punishment or is this extinction? Well, in this case, I think the reinforcer is probably Toby's attention, probably some sort of like conversation related to the topic of the photo or perhaps some other activity reinforcer that could happen as a result of sending one of these kinds of adult photos to another person. But in any case, if the reinforcer here is attention or some sort of access to a sexual partner, it's not happening. Not only that, no social attention is happening for that day. And in this case, we see that we see Sam is not interacting at all. Or excuse me, Toby's not interacting with Sam after receiving that photo. But that ignoring is temporary. So in this case, I'd say this is probably punishment by contingent withdrawal and not extinction. It's a temporary removal and it's removal of something that's probably not the reinforcer for sending that inappropriate photo to the other person. The distinction is not always clear, but one of the surefire ways of knowing whether you're looking at a difference between negative punishment and extinction is look at the length of time that the stimulus is being removed and look at the nature of the stimulus being removed. If it seems as if it's not related to the target behavior, if it seems like it's something else that's being removed, you're probably looking at punishment. If you see a withholding of the reinforcer that's been maintaining the response all along, you're probably looking at extinction. Let me know if you guys have any questions. This content, it can be pretty challenging. So come ask questions if you have them. Use the practice activity, which I think can be helpful. And let me know if you need any assistance. I'll see you guys next time.