27 Nov 2020
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Week 2 Notes
Jan. 17, 2020
Chapter 3: Habituation, Sensitization, and Familiarization
• Behavioral processes
What are the different forms of non-associative learning?
Three types of simple learning
• We frequently encounter the same stimuli day after day
o Same social contacts
o Same locations
o Same classes
o Same thing over and over again
• Most organisms can learn about stimuli that are frequently encountered
1. Habituation
• Decreasing responses to a frequent but innocuous stimulus
• Big original response but with repetition decrease response
• Not scary or harmful or exciting
• Ex. Meeting a new person
o On edge first meeting
o But second and third more comfortable
2. Sensitization
• Increasing responses to a noxious/ arousing stimulus
• Increase reacting the more it happens
• Something threatening to you
• Ex. Seeing a professor for the first time
o Nervous and does not have a good experience
o So next time you are even more nervous
• Effects can spread
3. Perceptual learning
• Becoming better at processing/ recognizing a frequent stimulus
• Repeated exposure to same stimuli and becomes faster in recognizing it
• More familiar
Although distinct, all three help adapt behaviour to predictable environments
What is Habituation?
• A decrease in the strength or occurrence of a behaviour due to repeated exposure
to the stimulus that produces the behaviour
• Ex. Acoustic startle response
o Measured in rodents
o Respond to a sound
o First time startled
o Second time less startled, less of a reaction
o By test 100 no reaction, know nothing is going to happen
o
• Behaviorist approach:
o Defines habituation as a decrease in behaviour
o Don’t have to care about rat’s feelings/ emotions
o Just observe behaviour
o Anything objectively studied
• Behaviorist approach
o Focusing on behaviour allows objective, standardized measurements
o Force of startle
Habituation: Quantification
• Fixation time- how long are they looking/focusing
• Note early strong responses, declining to later weak responses
• Asymptote
o Relatively stable point after substantial training
Characteristics of Habituation
• Habituation is ubiquitous
o It is found throughout the animal kingdom
o Even some single-celled organisms
o https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2714193/
• Across all these organisms, there are striking similarities in the way habituation works
• Habituation in dog training
o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGWHbmQ60Rk
Topics to discuss:
• Dishabituation
o A novel/arousing stimulus can temporarily recover responses to the habituating
stimulus
o This fades quickly though
o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8bF_zf6UBU
o Initial habituation
o Different noise and back to startle
o Erases the original habituation to both the original and new noise
o Erasing habituation with some other type of stimuli
o Habituation can return though
• Stimulus specificity
o Generally, responses only decrease to the habituating stimulus
o For very similar stimuli, however, there can be some generalization
o Exact same sound over and over again
o if VERY similar noise it can also work
o stimulus specific