And what once worked is liable to work again in the future when conditions revert. Therefore, organisms who inherited a tendency towards persistence would be favored by natural selection. Of course, even behaviors which are generally adaptive can be maladaptive on occasion. We can all think of times when we persisted in a behavior that we should have abandoned much earlier. But it is important to recognize that the general propensity to persist with well-established behavior is adaptive, and so has been selected for.
Spontaneous recovery is adaptive for similar reasons.
What the study of schedules of reinforcement is really all about is looking at how the various ways that the environment makes reinforcement available determines how we behave. Furthermore, the study of schedules is primarily a study of the development of the history of the individual in a particular environment. Let's look at the basic schedules of reinforcement to get a better understanding of how the patterning of reinforcement affects behavior. These two basic types are further broken down into F ixed and V ariable. The term interval is in some ways misleading, since it implies that waiting is what is important.