The Relation Between Amount of Effort and Extinction

After the presentation of the theory that extinction is a process motivated by fatigue according to the experimental results of Mowrer and Jones (1943) many experimental investigations concerning about the relation between extinction and effortfulness were carried out. The three kinds of method to express the variables of effort, the barpress (Aiken, 1957; Applezweig, 1951; Maatsch, Adelman & Denny, 1954; Mowrer, Jones, 1943; Stanley, Aamodt, 1954; Weiss, 1961), Lashley's jumping method (Solomon, 1948) and the running straight way (Freedenburg, 1956) used in these investigations have gotten the same results generally, although in details there are yet some differences among them. The result is that the relationship of number of unreinforcement response to the amount of work involved in each response is linear function. This result can be interpreted with Hullian theory that extinction is the function of reaction and conditioned inhibition and that reaction inhibition is occurred due to fatigue of which degree is correlated to the amount of energy consumption, in turn, correlated to the amount of works.