Extinction

Modified: 2020-03-27

In lay terms, you can think of extinction as the "unconditioning" or unlearning of a conditioned response. That sentence tells us something very important. That is, extinction is not like forgetting. We do not simply forget responses that have been conditioned. Rather, if we want to remove conditioned responses, we have to extinguish them. That fact has important implications in areas like therapy and child rearing.

Many years ago, Skinner conditioned some pigeons to make an operant response. He then put those pigeons on a vacation; he let them just spend their time in the lab without doing any more operant conditioning. When he returned them to the conditioning situation, some years after their original conditioning, they all exhibited the conditioned response. So, in a sense, conditioning is forever, unless it is extinguished.

How do we extinguish an animal? In classical conditioning, we remove the UCS. In operant conditioning, we remove the reinforcer. Over a period, the animal will learn that the CS, or the operant response, is no longer being reinforced. (The UCS is also considered to be a reinforcer.) We will see however, that conditioned behaviors can make a reappearance, even after extinction.

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