What makes extinction work

Typically, extinction bursts will increase initially and the child will engage in this negative behavior more frequently before the behavior goes away or decreases to an appropriate level. Extinction bursts can also happen after a long period during which the child does not engage in problem behavior.

This is referred to as Spontaneous Recovery. It is very important to be mindful of this possibility in order to be prepared to deal with it in the same way the behavior was dealt with initially. Instead of getting something good to strengthen the behavior, or having something added or taken away to suppress the behavior, nothing happens.

From the perspective of the child, the behavior no longer works to get the desired reinforcement any more. Their level of frustration varies from learner to learner in each specific situation. This is generally tolerable if the behavior is mildly protesting or attention seeking, such as whining or crying. In these situations, implementing an additional procedure to increase the desired behavior, e. No part of this article may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever wi thout written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For information, contact Special Learning Inc. This is because being ignored being left alone could be the outcome the person wants from engaging in the behaviour in the first place. If the function of the behaviour was to end up being ignored by others then instead of implementing an extinction procedure you would actually be implementing a reinforcement based procedure and inadvertently strengthening the behaviour, meaning it will occur more frequently in the future and will certainly not become "extinct".

To illustrate this point we'll use the example below. Jane has started in a new school and the teachers have begun to notice that during break time she sometimes screams and shouts when a teacher goes anywhere near her while she is playing on the swings. However, Jane does this precisely because the teachers leave her alone to play on the swings by herself.

Jane quickly learned that by screaming or shouting the teacher would leave her alone and so the behaviour of screaming and shouting was reinforced the behaviour was negatively reinforced by the removal of the teacher which was a good outcome for Jane. So they are not implementing an extinction procedure even though they think they are; this is why identifying the function of the behaviour is so important. This functional assessment would lead to a hypothesis that the reason the behaviour is occurring is so that Jane can be left alone ignored while playing on the swings and this hypothesis may be tested using a functional analysis.

In fact, she would be perfectly entitled to want to be left alone to do this and, as previously mentioned, if an extinction based procedure was implemented it would more than likely be used with a procedure that would increase an adaptive response to replace the maladaptive screaming. So the outcome for Jane would be the same being left alone to play on the swing but her method of obtaining what she wanted would be more adaptive.

As an example, consider Brian and the screaming and shouting he engaged in to gain attention from his teachers. When the extinction procedure is first implemented and Brian is alone for a few minutes he begins to scream and shout.

Within an Applied Behaviour Analysis ABA programme, data would be continuously recorded on Brian's screaming the "target behaviour" and this data would be graphed each day so it could be visually analysed to identify if the extinction procedure is working. The image below presents an example of how an extinction burst may appear on a graph that is recording how many minutes of screaming occur each day both before the extinction procedure was implemented baseline and then during its implementation.

Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. What could cause a person or animal to stop engaging in a previously conditioned behavior?

Extinction is one explanation. In psychology, extinction refers to the gradual weakening of a conditioned response that results in the behavior decreasing or disappearing. In other words, the conditioned behavior eventually stops. For example, imagine that you taught your dog to shake hands. Over time, the trick became less interesting.

You stop rewarding the behavior and eventually stop asking your dog to shake. Eventually, the response becomes extinct, and your dog no longer displays the behavior. In classical conditioning , when a conditioned stimulus is presented alone without an unconditioned stimulus , the conditioned response will eventually cease. For example, in Pavlov's classic experiment , a dog was conditioned to salivate to the sound of a bell.

When the bell was repeatedly presented without the presentation of food, the salivation response eventually became extinct. In operant conditioning , extinction occurs when a response is no longer reinforced following a discriminative stimulus.

Skinner described how he first observed this phenomenon:. 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.

Let's take a closer look at a few more examples of extinction. Imagine that a researcher has trained a lab rat to press a key to receive a food pellet. What happens when the researcher stops delivering the food?

While extinction will not occur immediately, it will after time. If the rat continues to press the key but does not get the pellet, the behavior will eventually dwindle until it disappears entirely.