Question

​14.​Baby Alice is playing with a white bunny rabbit when a loud noise suddenly startles her, and she begins to cry. Alice is later given a white cat to play with and begins crying again. Her reaction to the white cat illustrates:

a.

Generalization

b.

Discrimination

c.

spontaneous recovery

d.

Extinction

Answer 1

Hello!

The answer for your question is option( a)Generalization.

I say so because generalisation means the tendency to respond in the same way to different but similar stimuli.

I will furthur write an example for you to understand it better. Let's assume a little boy named Trevor is out in the woods and he spots a 15 feet cobra that just ate a little cute white house mouse and when Trevor gets back home he checks on his little white mouse and imagines a snake attacking his mouse and he is afraid of snakes now. Sometime passes and Trevor is in the woods again ,this time he sees a 3 feet long harmless water snake from the nearby pond and is terrified of it .Here what you have to notice is that Trevor does not consider which snake it is or does not acknowledge if it is harmful or harmless , he now is just afraid of snakes in general and the thought of a snake can awake fear in him .Hence he generalizes snake of any kind to be harmful and his response is the same towards any snake .

similarly, the little girl Alice as mentioned in your question associates the loud noise with the white bunny and the white cat .Since both her bunny and cat are of the colour white she generalizes it as something in white hence her reaction is the same towards the bunny and the cat as both were white and she cannot seem to tell the difference between the two.

Thankyou, hope this helped!