Which of the following would best explain a situation in which a small child is afraid of a guinea pig because he had a previously fearful experience with a hamster?
Stimulus discrimination
Second-order conditioning
Stimulus generalization
Sensory preconditioning
Spontaneous recovery
This would be Second-order conditioning. The child was conditioned once with a hamster, and because of this experience applied what was learned to a NEW stimulus...the guinea pig.
Nice try, anonymous, but I would disagree. It is stimulus generalization. The response is generalized from one animal to the other.
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The best explanation for a situation in which a small child is afraid of a guinea pig because he had a previously fearful experience with a hamster is stimulus generalization.
Stimulus generalization refers to when an individual responds to a stimulus that is similar to the original stimulus that caused the fear or anxiety. In this case, the child had a fearful experience with a hamster, and as a result, he generalized that fear to other similar small animals like guinea pigs.
To arrive at this answer, we can use the process of elimination:
- Stimulus discrimination refers to the ability to differentiate between similar stimuli and respond differently to them. However, in this situation, the child is not differentiating between the hamster and the guinea pig but is instead generalizing the fear.
- Second-order conditioning occurs when a conditioned stimulus is paired with a new neutral stimulus to create a conditioned response. However, this explanation does not apply in this scenario as there is no mention of any new neutral stimulus being paired with the guinea pig.
- Sensory preconditioning refers to the process in which two neutral stimuli are paired together, and then one of the stimuli is paired with an unconditioned or conditioned stimulus. Again, this explanation does not apply in this situation as there is no mention of any neutral stimuli being paired together.
- Spontaneous recovery refers to the reappearance of a previously extinguished conditioned response after a period of time. This does not apply here since the fear is not resurfacing after a period of extinction but rather being generalized to a similar stimulus.
Therefore, stimulus generalization is the best explanation for this situation.