Chapter 3: Habituation

Habituation

A decrease in the strength or occurrence of a behavior after repeated exposure to the stimulus the produces the behavior

Acoustic Startle Relfex

A defensive response to a startling stimulus

Orienting Response

An organism’s innate response to a novel stimulus

Dishabituation

A renewal of a response, previously habituated, that occurs when the organism is presented with a novel stimulus

Spontaneous Recovery

Reappearance (or increase in strength) of a previously habituated response after a short period of no stimulus presentation

Sensitization

A phenomenon in which a salient stimulus (like an electrical shock) temporarily increases the strength of responses to other stimuli

Electrodermal Activity (EDA)

Fluctuations in the electrical properties of a person’s skill that are a consequence of activity in the peripheral nervous system

Dual Process Theory

The theory that habituation and sensitization are independent of each other but operate in parallel

Novel Object Recognition Task

A task in which an organism’s detection of and response to unfamiliar objects during exploratory behavior are used to measure its memories of past experience with those objects

Familiarity

The perception of similarity that occurs when an event is repeated

Priming

A phenomenon in which prior exposure to a stimulus can improve the ability to recognize that stimulus later

Word Stem Completion Task

A task in which participants are asked to fill in the blanks in a list of word stems to produce the first word that comes to mind; in a priming experiment, participants are more likely to produce a particular word (MOT → MOTEL)

Perceptual Learning

Learning in which experience with a set of stimuli makes it easier to distinguish those stimuli

Statistical Learning

Learning driven by repeated exposures to perceptual events that increases the familiarity and distinctiveness of those events

Spatial Learning

The acquisition of information about one’s surroundings

Synaptic Depression

A reduction in synaptic transmission; a possible neural mechanism underlying habituation

Homosynaptic

Occuring in one synapse without affecting nearby synapses

Heterosynaptic

Occuring in several nearby synapses simultaneously

Receptive Field

The range (field) of physical stimuli that activate a single neuron

Cortical Plasticity

The capacity to change cortical organization as a result of experience

Place Cells

A neuron that fires maximally when the organism enters a particular location within an environment

Stroke

A event in which blood flow to some region of the brain stops or in which an artery ruptures, causing neurons in the affected region to die

Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy

A motor-rehabilitation technique in which unaffected limbs are restrained to increase usage of dysfunctional limbs

Cochlear Implant

A sensory prosthesis that directly stimulates auditory nerves to produce hearing sensations in deaf individuals