Habituation

Habituation is a form of learning in which an organism decreases or ceases to respond to a stimulus after repeated presentations. Essentially, the organism learns to stop responding to a stimulus which is no longer biologically relevant. For example, organisms may habituate to repeated sudden loud noises when they learn these have no consequences. Habituation usually refers to a reduction in innate behaviours, rather than behaviours developed during conditioning in which the process is termed "extinction". A progressive decline of a behavior in a habituation procedure may also reflect nonspecific effects such as fatigue, which must be ruled out when the interest is in habituation as a learning process.

The habituation process is a form of adaptive behavior (or neuroplasticity) that is classified as non-associative learning. Non-associative learning is a change in a response to a stimulus that does not involve associating the presented stimulus with another stimulus or event such as a reward or punishment. (Examples of associative learning include classical conditioning and operant conditioning). Habituation is the decrease of a response to a repeated eliciting stimulus that is not due to sensory adaption or motor fatigue. Sensory adaptation (or neural adaptation) occurs when an organism can no longer detect the stimulus as efficiently as when first presented and motor fatigue occurs when an organism is able to detect the stimulus but can no longer respond efficiently. In contrast, habituation is a learned adaption to the repeated presentation of a stimulus, not a reduction in sensory or motor ability.

Some related phenomena to habituation include sensitization and stimulus generalization/discrimination. Sensitization is the opposite process to habituation, i.e. an increase in the elicited behavior from repeated presentation of a stimulus. There may also be an initial increase in response immediately prior to the decline (a sensitization process followed by a habituation process). Another related phenomenon is stimulus generalization, when habituation occurs in response to other stimuli that are similar to the original stimulus. The opposing process, stimulus discrimination, is when habituation does not occur to other stimuli that are dissimilar to the original stimulus.

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