[2] For example, if a person has learned in the past that every time they eat an apple, their throat becomes itchy and swollen, they might assume they are allergic to all fruit.
When this person is offered a banana to eat, they reject it upon assuming they are also allergic to it through generalizing that all fruits cause the same reaction.
The curvilinear shape of the gradient is achieved by placing the perceived similarity of a stimulus on the x-axis and the strength of the response on the y-axis.
[2] In fact, infants generalize so well during early stages of development (such as learning to recognize specific sounds as language) that it can be hard for them to discriminate between variations of the generalized stimuli at later stages of development (such as failing to distinguish between the subtly different sounds of similar phonemes).
[2] One potential explanation for why children are such efficient learners is that they operate in accordance with the goal of making their world more predictable, therefore encouraging them to hold strongly to generalizations that effectively help them to navigate their environment.
[2] For example, generalization is an important part of how humans learn to trust unfamiliar people[11] and a necessary element in language acquisition.
[13] In the past, it was thought that the information forgotten between periods of learning when implementing spaced presentation inhibited generalization.
In more recent years, this forgetting has been seen as promoting generalization through repetition of information during each occasion of spaced learning.
If the dog generalizes this training, it may not discriminate between the sound of the whistle and other stimuli, so it would come running to its owner when it hears any high-pitched noise.
This is important for the survival of the organism; humans and animals need to be able to assess aversive situations and respond appropriately based on generalizations made from past experiences.
Months later, additional trials showed that Little Albert had generalized his fear response to things that were similar to the white rat, including a dog, a rabbit, and a fur coat.