What describes the spread of reinforcement effects to untrained behaviors or environments?

Generalization refers to the process in which the effects of reinforcement extend to behaviors or contexts that were not specifically trained. When a behavior is reinforced in a particular environment or under specific conditions, this may result in similar behaviors occurring in different environments or situations where the original reinforcement was not directly applied.

For instance, if a child learns to say "please" when asking for something at home and receives positive reinforcement (like getting what they want), they may start to use "please" in other settings, such as at school or in the park, even though they were not explicitly trained to do so in those environments. This demonstrates how reinforcement can lead to broader applications of learned behaviors beyond the specific instances in which the individual was taught.

In contrast, conditioning is a broader term that encompasses the learning process through which associations are formed between stimuli and responses but does not specifically refer to the spread of reinforcement effects. Extinction involves the reduction of a behavior when reinforcement is no longer provided, and habituation refers to a decrease in response to a stimulus after repeated presentations. These concepts do not capture the essence of behavioral spread that generalization represents.