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habituation

 
Dictionary: ha·bit·u·a·tion   (hə-bĭch'ū-ā'shən) pronunciation
 
n.
  1. The process of habituating or the state of being habituated.
    1. Physiological tolerance to a drug resulting from repeated use.
    2. Psychological dependence on a drug.
  2. Psychology. The decline of a conditioned response following repeated exposure to the conditioned stimulus.

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World of the Body: habituation
 

You are sitting quietly, reading a book. Suddenly, a tap on the window startles you. Your heart rate rises momentarily and you glance at the window to see if someone is there. But you see that the wind has strengthened and the branch of a tree has touched the glass. As your interest returns to the book, repeated taps of the branch on the window evoke progressively smaller reactions, until they hardly intrude into your reading at all.

The gradual reduction of existing responses to repeated presentations of a stimulus is ‘habituation’. At first sight, it might seem that habituation is nothing more than some sort of fatigue process in the relevant sensory or motor neural pathways. But habituation has several key characteristics that identify it as an active process that is biologically useful. For example, once the response to a familiar stimulus has habituated, another intense stimulus can cause the response to the familiar stimulus to return immediately, by a process of dishabituation. Furthermore, habituation is relatively stimulus-specific, so that responses to the repeated stimulus are reduced but responses to different, novel stimuli are not. Neither of these characteristics is consistent with a fatigue mechanism for habituation. Instead, they indicate an active, stimulus-specific form of learning. More complex forms of learning, such as conditioning, involve an association between two or more stimuli or events. Habituation does not, so it is regarded as a non-associative form of learning.

Habituation is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. It has been observed in the gill-withdrawal reflex of marine molluscs, in limb-withdrawal reflexes mediated by the spinal cord of mammals, and in the auditory startle response discussed above. Just like more complex forms of memory, habituation initially depends upon short-term mechanisms that last between minutes and hours. With more stimulus presentations occurring over hours or days, long-term mechanisms take over and these can support habituated responses over much longer periods.

Habituation is present from an early stage of development and can be seen in infants as young as two months, who like to fixate and inspect novel visual stimuli. When presented with pairs of pictures that always include both a familiar and a new scene, the infants will fixate the new picture — indicating a habituation of the fixation response to the familiar scene. Habituation to the previously presented stimulus maximizes input from the new stimulus. Other novel stimuli may be of great significance because they may signal danger. Reflex responses to such stimuli provide appropriate defensive behaviours. But if the stimuli are not intense and no damage is done, then repeated presentation leads to habituation.

Habituation allows the nervous system to optimize sensory-motor processing by eliminating unnecessary responses. It allows us to adapt to the familiar in order to preserve our ability to react rapidly and appropriately to the new.

— Christopher Yeo

 
Dental Dictionary: habituation
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n

A state in which an individual involuntarily tends to continue the use of a drug. Generally refers to the state in which an individual continues self-administration of a drug because of psychologic dependence without physical dependence.

 

Reduction of an animal's behavioral response to a stimulus, as a result of a lack of reinforcement during continual exposure to the stimulus. Habituation is usually considered a form of learning in which behaviours not needed are eliminated. It may be separated from most other forms of decreased response on the basis of permanence; the habituated animal either does not resume its earlier reaction to the stimulus after a period of no stimulus, or, if the normal reaction is resumed on reexposure to the stimulus, it wanes more quickly than before. Vital responses (e.g., flight from a predator) cannot be truly habituated.

For more information on habituation, visit Britannica.com.

 

A learning process resulting in the diminution and eventual loss of a normal behavioural response or sensation. Habituation results from continuous stimulation with a constant stimulus. It explains how, for example, cricketers become accustomed to uncomfortable sports equipment (such as protective helmets) and swimmers become accustomed to cold water.

 
Biology Q&A: What is habituation?
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Habituation is the decreased response to a stimulus that is repeated without reinforcement. Habituation can be very important to an animal in its natural surroundings. As an example, young ducklings run for cover when a shadow (a possible predator) passes overhead; gradually, however, the ducklings learn which types of shadows are dangerous and which are harmless.

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World of the Mind: habituation
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(adaptation)
In general, an aspect of learning whereby an animal becomes accustomed to a situation that persists. In a narrower sense, habituation is the gradual loss of a reflex behaviour by repetition of a stimulus without reinforcement — for example, continual tapping on the shell of a snail; after a few taps, it ceases to emerge from its shell. Habituation, or adaptation, allows animals to disregard irrelevant stimuli. (If the snail came out every time its shell got tapped, it would get worn out!) Some reflexes are highly resistant to habituation — such as blinking at loud sounds, or at air blown on the eye. This may be because these reflexes are particularly necessary to the survival of the organism, disregard of the stimuli being highly dangerous. See also invertebrate learning and intelligence.

(Published 1987)
    Bibliography
  • Hilgard, E. R., and Marquis, D. G. (1940). Conditioning and Learning.


 
Veterinary Dictionary: habituation
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1. the gradual adaptation to a stimulus or to the environment.
2. the extinction of a conditioned reflex by repetition of the conditioned stimulus; called also negative adaptation.

 
Wikipedia: Habituation
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In psychology, habituation is the psychological process in humans and animals in which there is a decrease in psychological response and behavioral response to a stimulus after repeated exposure to that stimulus over a duration of time.

Contents

Background

Habituation is very similar to acclimation, in that repetition of certain behaviors that are rewarding to a life form will likely be continued, or ingrained in a habitual manner. For example, for all life forms on Earth, obtaining life-sustaining matter that exists externally from those beings, such as food, water and shelter, is a habituated behavior. The learning underlying habituation is a fundamental or basic process of biological systems and does not require conscious motivation or awareness to occur. Indeed, without habituation we would be unable to distinguish meaningful information from the background, unchanging information. Habituation has been shown in essentially every species of animal, including the large protozoan Stentor coeruleus. [1]

Psychological significance in humans

Habituation need not be conscious - for example, a short time after a human dresses in clothing, the stimulus clothing creates disappears from our nervous systems and we become unaware of it. In this way, habituation is used to ignore any continual stimulus, presumably because changes in stimulus level are normally far more important than absolute levels of stimulation. This sort of habituation can occur through neural adaptation in sensory nerves themselves and through negative feedback from the brain to peripheral sensory organs.

Habituation is frequently used in testing psychological phenomena. Both adults and infants gaze lesser at a particular visual stimulus the longer it is presented. The amount of time spent looking at a new stimulus after habituation to the initial stimulus indicates the effective similarity of the two stimuli. It is also used to discover the resolution of perceptual systems. For instance, by habituating someone to one stimulus, and then observing responses to similar ones, one can detect the smallest degree of difference that is detectable.

Dishabituation is when a second stimulus is presented in unison with a primary stimulus, and may briefly increase habituated response toward the primary stimulus until an organism distinguishes, or discriminates the differences between two different stimuli. Dishabituation has been demonstrated as being inherently different than psychological sensitization.

See also

References

  1. ^ Wood, D. C. (1988). Habituation in Stentor produced by mechanoreceptor channel modification. Journal of Neuroscience, 8, 2254-2258 .

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Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
World of the Body. The Oxford Companion to the Body. Copyright © 2001, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
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Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Habituation" Read more