Question

The substitute teacher offered the students candy for correctly solving math problems. So, for that entire week, whenever she put a problem on the board, the conditioned students eagerly copied it down and expanded maximum effort to solve it correctly. Then, on Monday, their regular math teacher came back. That day, when she put a problem on the board, the students still retained some of their eagerness. By Tuesday, however all had suddenly seemed to lose interest in doing math. Why?

Answer 1

Answer: Extinction.

Explanation:

Extinction refers to a phenomenon of conditioned behavior, that appears when a behavior that used to be reinforced doesn´t have reinforcing consequences anymore, getting the behavior to stop.

In this case, the disappearance of the conditioned response (the candy), makes the behavior of showing eagerness to do math slowly decreases, until it disappears.