
Behavior that has been maintained on an intermittent schedule ofreinforcement (e.g., VR; VI; FR; FI) is more resistant to extinction than a behavior reinforced on continuous schedule The less often a behavior is reinforced the harder it is to extinguish
Does extinction influence the resistance to extinction?
Number of Extinction Trials Successive applications of conditioning and extinction may influence the resistance to extinction. Three tentative statements describing resistance to extinction as it relates to continuous and intermittent reinforcement
Do animals with higher extinction ratios have faster extinction rates?
Thus, animals with higher ratios ought to have faster extinction, in contrast to the usual partial reinforcement findings. This prediction of Capaldi's, however, proved false.
Do continuously reinforced trials lead to faster extinction?
In like fashion, there are a number of studies suggesting that greater numbers of continuously reinforced trials during acquisition will result in faster extinction.
Can extinction occur without physical reinforcement?
As you may imagine, there are now a number of studies that employ some variant of a procedure in which extinction can commence in the absence of an overt, physical, non-reinforced response by the animal. A third class of findings concerns the partial reinforcement effect. Normally, animals on partial reinforcement exhibit slower extinction.

What types of schedules would be most resistant to extinction?
Typically, fixed schedules of reinforcement are more prone to extinction while variable schedules are more resistant. Extinction can result in undesirable side effects. 2 One is called a response burst, which is when the response temporarily increases in amount, magnitude, or duration before becoming extinct.
Why is variable ratio most resistant to extinction?
Variable ratios In variable ratio schedules, the individual does not know how many responses he needs to engage in before receiving reinforcement; therefore, he will continue to engage in the target behavior, which creates highly stable rates and makes the behavior highly resistant to extinction.
Which schedule of reinforcement is most resistant to the extinction of learned responses?
Among the reinforcement schedules, variable ratio is the most productive and the most resistant to extinction. Fixed interval is the least productive and the easiest to extinguish (Figure 1).
Is classical conditioning resistant to extinction?
In classical conditioning, extinction occurs when the conditioned stimulus is applied repeatedly without being paired with the unconditioned stimulus. Over time, the learned behavior occurs less often and eventually stops altogether, and conditioned stimulus returns to neural.
Which schedule is the most resistant to extinction and why?
Out of the four types of partial reinforcement schedules, the variable-ratio is the schedule most resistant to extinction.
What is low resistance to extinction?
Resistance to Extinction. one can be resistant or not; how quickly can something go away. ▪ behavior will stay longer with high resistance; extinguish slower. ▪ if you have a low resistance to extinction it will go away faster; extinguish faster. You just studied 14 terms!
Which type of reinforcement is least resistant to extinction?
Among the different types of reinforcement schedules, the variable-ratio schedule (VR) is the most resistant to extinction whereas the continuous schedule is the least7.
Which of the following reinforcement schedules is most resistant to extinction quizlet?
Partial reinforcement schedules are more resistant to extinction than continuous reinforcement schedules.
Which partial reinforcement schedule is more resistant to extinction a variable or a fixed schedule quizlet?
Behavior that is reinforced on a variable schedule will be more resistant to extinction than behavior reinforced on a fixed schedule.
What is extinction conditioning?
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. For example, imagine that you taught your dog to shake hands. Over time, the trick became less interesting.
What is classical conditioning theory?
Classical conditioning is a type of learning that happens unconsciously. When you learn through classical conditioning, an automatic conditioned response is paired with a specific stimulus. This creates a behavior.
What is extinction in reinforcement theory?
Extinction is similar to punishment in that its purpose is to reduce unwanted behavior. The process of extinction begins when a valued behavioral consequence is withheld in order to decrease the probability that a learned behavior will continue. Over time, this is likely to result in the ceasing of that behavior.
Discriminative Stimuli and Extinction
Intermittent reinforcement is not the only factor that determines the return to operant level during extinction. Resistance to extinction is also affected by discriminative stimuli that are conditioned during sessions of reinforcement.
Spontaneous Recovery
An interesting phenomenon that occurs during extinction is called spontaneous recovery. After a session of extinction, the rate of response may be close to operant level. At this point, the animal is taken out of the operant chamber and returned to a holding cage.
What is the resistance to extinction?
But in general, extinction displays the same type of diminishing returns curve as does acquisition: The bigger changes will occur early in extinction, and later sessions of extinction will display progressively smaller changes in the response. Thus, as was true of acquisition , extinction involves a response being driven towards an asymptotic level of performance .
What is the third approach to extinction?
It is that the time course of extinction depends on the similarity of the learning and extinction contexts.
What is extinction in operant conditioning?
Extinction refers to both a procedure (actually, several procedures) and a finding. Within the framework of operant and instrumental conditioning, the typical procedure is this: Following previous conditioning of a response using either reinforcement or punishment, the outcome (the reinforcer or punisher) is removed. And the finding is this: Normally, following such removal of the outcome, behavior reverts to what it was prior to the initial learning. How long it takes to do so is referred to as the response's resistance to extinction .
What happens to partial reinforcement?
Different partial reinforcement schedules will have differing effects of extinction, but in general, partial reinforcement will lead to greater resistance to extinction than continuous reinforcement.
What an unfortunate choice of wording occurs in extinction, and in the ambiguous phrase resistance to extinction.
What an unfortunate choice of wording occurs in extinction, and in the ambiguous phrase resistance to extinction. The word carries connotations of destruction and loss. Dinosaurs become extinct, never to roam the earth again. So too might we expect old habits and memories to become extinct, irrecoverable, and irreplaceable. But that is not what happens in the process of extinguishing an operant or instrumental response. And for that reason, I've labeled this section acquisition of extinction: Almost all theorists today regard extinction as a process of continued learning. At issue is whether it is the learning to inhibit a response done earlier, the learning of a new response opposite to or incompatible with that performed earlier, or the learning that the earlier response is simply no longer effective .
Does reactive inhibition increase as an animal responds?
But as the animal keeps responding, reactive inhibition keeps increasing, until finally, the total amount of reactive inhibition exceeds the amount of excitation. And when that happens, by the principle of algebraic summation (i.e., effective reaction potential ), the animal ceases to respond.
Do animals learn to discriminate between learning stimuli and extinction stimuli?
Put that way, the animal has to learn to discriminate between the learning stimuli and the extinction stimuli. However, one of the findings that we know from the literature on generalization and discrimination is that ease of discrimination between two stimuli will be inversely related to their similarity.
