Spontaneous Recovery

Spontaneous recovery from extinction is one of the most basic phenomena ofPavlovian conditioning. Although it can be studied by using a variety ofdesigns, some procedures are better than others for identifying theinvolvement of underlying learning processes. A wide range of differentlearning mechanisms has been suggested as being engaged by extinction, most ofwhich have implications for the nature of spontaneous recovery. However,despite the centrality of the notion of spontaneous recovery to theunderstanding of extinction, the empirical literature on its determinants isrelatively sparse and quite mixed. Its very ubiquity suggests that spontaneousrecovery has multiple sources.