Understanding Spontaneous Recovery in Psychology

Spontaneous recovery can be tricky to understand when we look at how behaviors change.

1. What is Extinction?

• Extinction happens when a learned response gets weaker. This happens when the thing you associate with a reaction is shown over and over, but without the thing that originally caused the reaction.
• For example, think of Pavlov's dogs. When the bell rings but no food is given, the dogs start to salivate less and less.

2. What is Spontaneous Recovery?

• Sometimes, after a break, the response that seemed to go away can come back.
• Studies show that about 66% of subjects can still show this recovered response after taking a break of about 24 hours.

3. Why is This a Challenge?

• Spontaneous recovery suggests that just because we don’t see a learned response anymore, it doesn’t mean it’s gone forever.
• Instead, it might just be pushed down or hidden.
• This means that even after a long time, people or animals can still show these learned behaviors, making it hard to say if a change in behavior is permanent.

In short, spontaneous recovery shows us that extinction doesn’t completely erase learned responses. Instead, it only makes them weaker for a while. This calls for us to think again about how we understand changing behaviors.