Habituation & Extinction

[jdoc04]

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Anyone have a good way to tell the difference between the two?

 

[denticus]

Anyone have a good way to tell the difference between the two?

I like to think of habituation as what occurs to the response when the subject is OVER-STIMULATED. Like if someone scares you everyday every time you walk into a room, after a while you'll be able to predict that and you won't respond as "surprisingly" as you had before. Extinction just describes the separation of association between the conditioned and unconditioned stimulus. For example, if you condition a dog to salivate when it hears a bell ring because everytime the bell rings the dog gets food, then you can carryout extinction by not presenting food everytime you ring the bell. Extinction will take place because the dog DOESN"T respond as it knows that it will no longer receive food after the bell rings. So in summary, Habituation is do to OVER or CONSTANT Stimulation usually associated with a startle or negative response, whereas extinction just describes the SEPARATION of association between the conditioned and unconditioned stimulus usually associated with a positive response (ie.salivation). Hope this helps. Good luck!

 

[jdoc04]

Here is an example to clarify a bit:
A monkey is trained to push a button in response to a bell.
Following the training, the bell is rung once every minute for 2 days, at which
time the monkey no longer pushes the button. This is an example of:

Habituation is the correct answer. I was thinking it was Extinction.

habituation--> cease of the response after repeated exposures
extinction--> cease of a learned response in absence of reinforcement

The question states training has occurred hence the reason I choose extinction.
I thought habituation was independent of training. Is this where I am wrong???

Anyone???

 

[sacjumpman]

Yeah, I think I'm with you.

It seems like they could both be an answer. "Extinction is the loss of an acquired behavior" (Cliff's AP bio).

But then habituation seems to fit also. "Learned behavior that allows the animal to disregard meaningless stimulus"

Extinction by habituation? I dunno.

Tricky. tricky.

 

[jdoc04]

Yeah well I'm hoping the actual test is more cut and dry. As long as you know the definitions of each answer choice.

 

[denticus]

Yeah well I'm hoping the actual test is more cut and dry. As long as you know the definitions of each answer choice.

I would also go with habituation simply because the bell was be rung a lot (constant stimulation). Eventually, the monkey will become desensitized to the bell ringing because it will associate the ringing bell with its natural environment and will no longer view it as a foreign stimulus. I wouldn't say extinction because they said that they trained the monkey but did not specify whether or not they used reinforcement. In other words, they described nowhere in the problem a relationship between a conditioned and unconditioned stimulus. In fact, there is no unconditioned stimulus. In other words, there is no ONE KNOWN stimulus in nature that will cause monkeys to push buttons. If there is not unconditioned stimulus then they couldn't have made an association between it and the conditioned stimulus. Extinction usually tampers with NATURAL response (ie.salivation, aggression, fear etc..) as opposed to learned action behaviors (ie. pushing button, flipping lever etc...); this suggests habituation. Good luck.