What could cause a person or animal to stop engaging in a previously conditioned behavior? Extinction is one explanation. In psychology, extinction refers to the gradual weakening of a conditioned response that results in the behavior decreasing or disappearing. In other words, the conditioned behavior eventually stops. Show For example, imagine that you taught your dog to shake hands. Over time, the trick became less interesting. You stop rewarding the behavior and eventually stop asking your dog to shake. Eventually, the response becomes extinct, and your dog no longer displays the behavior. In classical conditioning, when a conditioned stimulus is presented alone without an unconditioned stimulus, the conditioned response will eventually cease. For example, in Pavlov's classic experiment, a dog was conditioned to salivate to the sound of a bell. When the bell was repeatedly presented without the presentation of food, the salivation response eventually became extinct. In operant conditioning, extinction occurs when a response is no longer reinforced following a discriminative stimulus. B. F. Skinner described how he first observed this phenomenon: "My first extinction curve showed up by accident. A rat was pressing the lever in an experiment on satiation when the pellet dispenser jammed. I was not there at the time, and when I returned I found a beautiful curve. The rat had gone on pressing although no pellets were received... The change was more orderly than the extinction of a salivary reflex in Pavlov's setting, and I was terribly excited. It was a Friday afternoon and there was no one in the laboratory who I could tell. All that weekend I crossed streets with particular care and avoided all unnecessary risks to protect my discovery from loss through my accidental death." Let's take a closer look at a few more examples of extinction. Imagine that a researcher has trained a lab rat to press a key to receive a food pellet. What happens when the researcher stops delivering the food? While extinction will not occur immediately, it will after time. If the rat continues to press the key but does not get the pellet, the behavior will eventually dwindle until it disappears entirely. Conditioned taste aversions can also be affected by extinction. Imagine that you ate some ice cream right before getting sick and throwing it up. As a result, you developed a taste aversion to ice cream and avoided eating it, even though it was formerly one of your favorite foods. One way to overcome this reluctance would be to expose yourself to ice cream, even if just the thought of eating it made you feel a little queasy. You might start by taking just a few small tastes over and over again. As you continued to eat the food without getting sick, your conditioned aversion would eventually diminish. If the conditioned response is no longer displayed, does that really mean that it's gone forever? In his research on classical conditioning, Pavlov found that when extinction occurs, it doesn't mean that the subject returns to their unconditioned state. Allowing several hours or even days to elapse after a response has been extinguished can result in the spontaneous recovery of the response. Spontaneous recovery refers to the sudden reappearance of a previously extinct response. In his research on operant conditioning, Skinner discovered that how and when a behavior is reinforced could influence how resistant it was to extinction. He found that a partial schedule of reinforcement (reinforcing a behavior only part of the time) helped reduce the chances of extinction. Rather than reinforcing the behavior each and every time it occurs, the reinforcement is given only after a certain amount of time has elapsed or a certain number of responses have occurred. This sort of partial schedule results in behavior that is stronger and more resistant to extinction. A number of factors can influence how resistant a behavior is to extinction. The strength of the original conditioning can play an important role. The longer the conditioning has taken place and the magnitude of the conditioned response may make the response more resistant to extinction. Behaviors that are very well established may become almost impervious to extinction and may continue to be displayed even after the reinforcement has been removed altogether. Some research has suggested that habituation may play a role in extinction as well. For example, repeated exposure to a conditioned stimulus may eventually lead you to become used to it, or habituated. Because you have become habituated to the conditioned stimulus, you are more likely to ignore it and it's less likely to elicit a response, eventually leading to the extinction of the conditioned behavior. Personality factors might also play a role in extinction. One study found that children who were more anxious were slower to habituate to a sound. As a result, their fear response to the sound was slower to become extinct than non-anxious children.
An extinction burst is a sudden increase in the frequency, intensity, or duration of an organism’s operant behavior just before it extinguishes. In operant conditioning, habitual behavior is learned or reinforced by adding a favorable reinforcer (positive reinforcement) or removing an aversive reinforcer (negative reinforcement). During extinction, the reinforcer is eliminated and the unwanted behavior eventually ceases to occur1. Even though the extinction process ultimately ends a target behavior, a dramatic increase is often observed during the early stages of extinction. This extinction burst period can be found in humans and animals2. Not all extinctions go through extinction bursts. Burst only appear in a small portion (roughly one-third) of cases in some treatments for problem behaviors3.  Spontaneous recovery vs extinction burstSpontaneous recovery is the return of extinguished behavior after extinction has passed for a period of time. Some people confuse this relapse effect with extinction bursts. The difference between spontaneous recovery and extinction burst is that spontaneous recovery is a complete return after the disappearance of a behavior while extinction burst is a temporary increase of behavior that is being extinct4. Using extinction burst in treating behavior disordersExtinction is often used to decrease undesired behavior in children5 such as aggression6, self-injurious behavior7, and property destruction8. Extinction can be an effective treatment in removing maladaptive behaviors, but extinction bursts are problematic side effects because initially, the negative behavior being removed increases rather than decreases during the extinction procedure. With behavior problems such as self-harm, bursts of aggressive behavior can pose a risk to the individuals, even if it is just a temporary increase. Extinction bursts makes it difficult to determine whether the behavioral interventions are effective or not. For example, unsuitable treatment may continue longer than it should if incompatibility is mistaken for extinction burst. Potentially effective treatment may be stopped too early if an extinction burst is mistaken for negative end result. Extinction burst examplesCocaine addictionCocaine addiction is a chronic relapsing disease. The compulsive drug-seeking behavior when the drug is not readily available characterizes drug addiction9. Since drug-related events or stimuli in everyday life can easily trigger a relapse, drug addiction can be difficult to overcome10. An addict’s most common strategy for extinction of drug use is abstinence. During withdrawal, extinction bursts cause such drug seeking behavior to intensify when cues are present in the natural environment11. If the addict is successful in getting and administering the drug during the bursts, extinction fails and the behavior patterns are reinforced. Toddler tantrumsExtinction is used in parenting quite often. In dealing with toddler tantrums, extinction is one popular parenting technique. Some parents consider toddler tantrums voluntary behaviors that a child uses to get what they want. If the child’s parent stops giving in, the bad behavior will become extinct because of the lack of reinforcement. However, the first time the parent refuses to give in, the child is likely to become even more upset, increasing the intensity of the tantrum due to extinction bursts. If parents give in at this point, the extinction fails. The child’s tantrum throwing is reinforced and the behavioral patterns continue. References
|
When the behavior is negatively reinforced what happens after the behavior during extinction?
zusammenhängende Posts
Urheberrechte © © 2024 frojeostern Inc.
