A child has learned to avoid a furry, black cat. However, she still plays with her grandmother’s short-haired tabby. Her response demonstrates?
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Answer: C. discrimination
Explanation
Stimulus discrimination allows an organism to respond differently to similar environmental stimuli. The child successfully distinguishes between the dangerous black cat and her grandmother pet. This behavioral process prevents overgeneralization of conditioned avoidance responses. Discrimination is a fundamental concept in classical and operant conditioning paradigms. It involves reinforcing responses to specific stimuli while withholding reinforcement for others. Animals and humans utilize discrimination to navigate complex sensory environments safely.
Children learn to differentiate between safe adults and strangers through similar cognitive mechanisms. Discrimination training is widely applied in behavioral therapies for phobias and anxiety. Classroom learning requires students to discriminate between relevant facts and distractors. Negative transfer occurs when previous learning hinders the acquisition of a new skill. Extinction involves the gradual weakening of a conditioned response when unreinforced. Successive approximation refers to reinforcing steps that lead toward a complex target behavior.
- Subject
- Psychology
- Category
- Psychology
- Topic
- —
- Difficulty
- medium
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