Dishabituation

Dishabituation (or dehabituation) is a form of recovered or restored behavioral response wherein the reaction towards a known stimulus is enhanced, as opposed to habituation. Initially, it was proposed as an explanation to increased response for a habituated behavior by introducing an external stimulus; however, upon further analysis, the focus was conclusively established that a proper analysis of dishabituation should be taken into consideration only when the response is increased by implying the original stimulus.

Based on studies conducted over habituation's dual-process theory which attributed towards dishabituation, it is also determined that the latter was independent of any behavioral sensitization.

The phenomenon was studied by an early scientist Samuel Jackson Holmes in 1912, while he was studying the animal behavior in sea urchins. Later in 1933, George Humphrey—while studying the same effects in human babies and extensively over lower vertebrates—argued that dishabituation is in fact the removal of habituation altogether, to a behavior that was not conditioned to begin with.

According to the dual-process theory of habituation, dishabituation is characterized by an increase in responding to a habituated stimulus after introducing a deviant, to sensitize a change in arousal. Further investigations into elicitation and habituation of the electrodermal orienting reflex also showed that dishabituation is independent of sensitization for indifferent stimuli.

A meta-analysis shows that dishabituation is improvised on preterm infants as compared to term infants based on the magnitude of stimulus sensitized.

As per the Center for Neural Engineering, University of Southern California (Los Angeles), the primordial hippocampus plays an important role in modeling the dishabituation of behavioral response. According to this, the interaction of two processes is dynamically postulated based on synaptic plasticity, which acquires both long and short-term forgetting. Along with that, cumulative shrinking is proposed to map responses from the temporal region of the anterior thalamus that references the spatial positions. The plasticity model combined with the structure of medial pallium model provides us with a structured network of neural mechanisms, contributing towards dishabituation and habituation alike.

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