Question

Marjoe had trained his dog that whenever it saw a photo of the cat next door, it would receive a treat. Through multiple pairings of the photo and the treat, the dog came to salivate when the photo alone was presented. Marjoe then extinguished the salivation behavior by presenting the photo but withholding the treat. He was surprised to find that, a week later, when he happened to hold up the photo of the cat, his dog started to salivate. What is going on here? A) spontaneous recoveny B) stimulus discrimination C) stimulus generalization D) regenerative responding

Answer 1

a) spontaneous recovery

Step-by-step explanation:

In classical conditioning, the term spontaneous recovery is defined as the reappearance of the conditioned response after a rest period or period of lessened response. In other words, the conditioned response is back after it was thought to have disappeared.

In this example, Marjoe trained his dog that whenever it saw a photo of the cat next door, he'd receive a treat. The dog was conditioned to start salivating (conditioned response) whenever he saw the photo of the cat (conditioned stimulus). Then Marjoe extinguished the conditioned response by presenting the photo without the treat. However, a week later, when he hold up the photo of the cat, the dog started to salivate.

That is, he came up with the conditioned response after a rest period, so he presented the response when Marjoe thought it had disappeared.

Thus, this is an example of spontaneous recovery.

Note:

b) Stimulus discrimination refers to the capacity to recognize one specific stimulus among others.

c) Stimulus generalization refers to the fact that the response appears with similar stimulus but not with only one (the dog would salivate with any picture of cats)