Understanding Extinction and Spontaneous Recovery in Classical Conditioning

When we talk about classical conditioning, we need to understand two important ideas: extinction and spontaneous recovery.

1. Extinction:
   Imagine you have a dog that learns to expect food when it hears a bell. The bell is what we call the conditioned stimulus (CS), and the food is the unconditioned stimulus (US).

Now, if the bell rings but there is no food anymore, the dog will start to stop salivating over time. This is extinction. It doesn’t happen all at once. In fact, even after many times (about 10 to 15 times) of hearing the bell without getting food, the dog may still remember about half of its original response.

2. Spontaneous Recovery:
   After some time has passed since the dog last heard the bell and got no food, if the bell rings again, something interesting might happen. The dog may suddenly start to salivate again, even though it hasn’t gotten food for a while. This is called spontaneous recovery. Studies suggest that when the dog hears the bell again after a break, it might salivate with about 50% of the strength it had before.

So, extinction is when the learned response fades away, and spontaneous recovery is when that response can surprise us by coming back after a break.