The text states if you give them intermittent reinforcement we will never reach extinction and intermittent reinforcement has a good chance of kind of skewing your data This scenario illustrates a critical pitfall in implementing extinction inconsistency When a behavior that is supposedly on extinction is intermittently reinforced even inadvertently like picking up the phone every six months it essentially puts the behavior on an intermittent schedule of reinforcement Behaviors maintained by intermittent reinforcement are known to be more resistant to extinction than those maintained by continuous reinforcement This means the calls will persist for a much longer time and the exgirlfriend may even increase the frequency or intensity of her calls an extinction burst that is then reinforced as she learns that persistence sometimes leads to the desired outcome Option A is incorrect because extinction will not be quickly achieved the intermittent reinforcement will prevent it Option C is incorrect because spontaneous recovery is the reemergence of a previously extinguished behavior which cannot occur if the behavior has not been fully extinguished in the first place Option D is incorrect the exgirlfriend is not the one implementing planned ignoring a type of extinction on herself nor is it a likely outcome of the inconsistent reinforcement from the exboyfriend