What is spontaneous recovery?

• A. A fear returns after it had disappeared
• B. A new response is learned
• C. A stimulus generalizes
• D. A reward spontaneously appears

Answer: (A)

Spontaneous recovery is when a previously extinguished conditioned response briefly reappears after a period without the conditioned stimulus. This shows that the original association hasn’t been erased during extinction; it’s just suppressed, and given a rest, the response can resurface when the stimulus is encountered again, though often not as strong as before. In practice, this means that a fear or learned reaction can come back even though it seemed to have disappeared after extinction. The other ideas describe different processes: learning something new, generalizing the response to similar stimuli, or a reward appearing by chance, none of which capture the reappearance of an old response after a break.