Extinction in Psychology ?

In Pavlov conditioning, which is popular known as classical conditioning, in its experiment of a dog who develops an association of food with the ringing bell, but when the bell rang continuously, and no food came, unconditioned response i.e. salivation stops gradually. This gradual waning of the unconditioned response of the dog with the ringing of bell is a phenomena known that extinction. This was extinction found in Ivan Pavlov’s Classical conditioning.

This phenomena of extinction is not only observed in classical conditioning, but can be seen on operant conditioning too. Here is a simple example of extinction in Skinner’s operant conditioning. An operant behavior that has been previously reinforced no longer produces the desired outcome, the behavior gradually stops occurring. This gradual stopping of a particular behavior is marked as extinction.
Extinction in detail:

There is an on-going debate on whether extinction is involved in any of these models of association:

• “Unlearning” the unconditional stimulus (US) – Conditional stimulus (CS) association.
• A “new learning” of an inhibitory association that masks the original excitatory association.
• A third account concerns non-associative mechanisms such as habituation, modulation and response fatigue.

So, Myers and Davis suggested, as per their results in laboratory testing’s, that there could be a possibility that multiple mechanisms work at the same time, depending on the timing and situations in which the extinction befalls.

Extinction in Operant Conditioning

In the operant conditioning exemplar, the phenomena of extinction refers to the process of no longer providing the reinforcement that has been a reason or a result of a maintained behavior.

Forgetting is distinguished from Extinction in a way that in cognitive process of forgetting, there is a gradual decrease in occurrence of a behavior over time, even though it hasn’t not been emitted. For example, a child who climbs over the walls and such a response is reinforced by a attention of people around him that he seeks, when subsequently ignored by them, stops emitting this particular behavior of climbing up the walls. B.F. Skinner in his autobiography, mentioned how he accidently due to the malfunction of his laboratory equipment, accidentally discovered the extinction of an operant response, he quotes:

“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”

The discriminative stimulus, which is an outcome of an extinction stimulus of a particular response is known as extinction stimulus. With the presence of an extinction stimulus, there is a reinforcing consequence which is followed by a behavior which does not occur. Conversely, a discriminative stimulus is a signal indicating the occurrence of a reinforcement. Let us consider an example here, like in a skinner box, if food is only supplied when a response is emitted in the presence of a green light, here the green light is a discriminative stimulus. But in presence of a red light, and when food is not delivered, then we can say that this red light is an extinction stimulus. Where as in this entire experiment the food is a reinforcement.

Successful Extinction Procedures

Consistency is very important for the process of extinction to be achieved completely or successfully. When you do not respond in the presence of an extinction stimulus, extinction can be successfully achieved. For instance, when teacher ignores or does not pay any heed to a student’s bad attention-seeking behavior, such a behavior slowly goes into extinction. Resurgence is when such a behavior is emitted again after a certain period of time.

Extinction Burst

[large]The initially stages of an extinction, there might be a certain behavior occurrence which is called an extinction burst. When there is no response to an extinction stimulus in order to bring about extinction of a certain behavior, the time in between which is short-termed, what subject might exhibit is known as extinction burst.

Such an exhibition in the initial phase of extinction might be a rapid or frequent occurrence of a behavior followed by an ultimate decline marking the success of extinction. The extinction burst may also be marked by an emotional or an aggressive response.

Let us take an example of a pigeon that has been reinforced to tap on a button in order to receive food. The button is turned off, the pigeon in desire of food taps the button, gets no response, then starts tapping frequently, this frantic behavior of tapping the button again and again could be the extinction burst, but eventually, in the pursuit of extinction, this pecking would decrease gradually.

Although not explained by reinforcement theory, the extinction burst can be understood using control theory. In perceptual control theory, the degree of output involved in any action is proportional to the discrepancy between the reference value (desired rate of reward in the operant paradigm) and the current input. Thus, when reward is removed, the discrepancy increases, and the output is increased. In the long term, ‘reorganization’, the learning algorithm of control theory, would adapt the control system such that output is reduced.