Information AboutHabituation |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT HABITUATION | |
| behaviorism | |
| cognitive science | |
| learning | |
| educational technology | |
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Habituation need not be conscious - for example, a short time after we get dressed, 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. 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 is stimulus specific. It does not cause a general decline in responsiveness. It functions like an average weighted history Wavelet interference filter reducing the responsiveness of the organism to a particular stimulus. Frequently one can see Opponent Processes after the stimulus is removed. Habituation is connected to associational Reciprocal Inhibition phenomena, opponent processes, Motion Aftereffect s, Color Constancy , Size Constancy , and negative Afterimage s. Habituation is frequently used in testing psychological phenomena. Both infants and adults look less and less at a particular 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 example, by habituating someone to one stimulus, and then observing responses to similar ones, one can detect the smallest degree of difference that is detectable. Habituation is also commonly found in the case of odors. For example, one may not be able to smell one's own bad breath while being able to smell another's. Dishabituation is when a second stimulus is used, which briefly increases habituated response, it has been shown that this is a different mechanism from Sensitization . SEE ALSO
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