Chapter 3: Habituation, Sensitisation & Familiarisation - Learning about Repeated Events

Question 1

What is habituation?

Answer 1

the decrease in the strength of the response with repeated exposure to a particular eliciting stimuli

Question 2

Does elicited response, particularly a simple reflex response, automatically occur the same way each time the eliciting stimulus is presented/

Answer 2

NO

Behaviour is not invariant and can be modified

Question 3

What was concluded about visual attention in human infants?

Answer 3

Babies have longer attention spans when staring at the more complex/interesting stimuli

Question 4

What did visual attention in human infants measure?

Answer 4

Measured how long infants spent looking at a visual stimulus during successive trials

Question 5

What is acoustic startle reflex?

Answer 5

a defensive response (such as jumping or freezing) to a startling stimulus )such as a loud noise)

Question 6

What is orienting response?

Answer 6

an organism’s innate reaction to a novel stimulus

Question 7

With repeated starting stimuli the startle response will?

Answer 7

progressively go down; however, there still will be a response

Question 8

What is spontaneous recovery?

Answer 8

wait for a period of time before presenting the starting stimuli again, startle response returns

Question 9

What is an important feature of habituation?

Answer 9

is that habituation to one event does not cause habituation to every other stimuli in the same sensory modality

Question 10

What is dishabituation?

Answer 10

This renewal of responding after a new stimulus has be presented

Question 11

How rapidly a response habituates and how long the decrease in responding lasts depend on several factors, what are they?

Answer 11

how startling the stimulus is, the number of times experiences, and the length of time between repeated exposures

Question 12

What is spontaneous recovery?

Answer 12

a tumulus-evoked response that has been weakened by habituation increases in strength or reappears after a period of no stimulus presentation

Question 13

What is sensitisation?

Answer 13

a phenomenon in which experiences with an arousing stimulus lead to stronger responses to a later stimulus

Question 14

one way that researcher can study sensitisation experimental in humans is by measuring?

Answer 14

electrodermal activity (EDA)

Question 15

What is electrodermal activity (EDA)?

Answer 15

a measure of changes in the skin’s electrical conductivity that are caused by fluctuation in the activity of the peripheral nervous system

Question 16

What is sensory adaptation?

Answer 16

When the sense organs become temporally disabled to stimuli overload

Question 17

What is response fatigue?

Answer 17

when motor nerve or organs are fatigued

Question 18

What is the dual process theory?

Answer 18

the theory that habituation and sensitisation are independent of each other but operate in parallel

Question 19

How do both sensitisation and habituation occur in dual process theory?

Answer 19

both processes occur in response to every stimulus presentation, and it is the summed combination of thesis two independent processes that determine the strength of responding

Question 20

What does the dual-process theory assume?

Answer 20

that different types of underlying neural processes are responsible for increases and decreases in responsiveness to stimulation

Question 21

All observable responses are the sum result of what in the dual-process theory?

Answer 21

both habituation and sensitisation processes

Question 22

When are habituation processes assumed to occur in the dual-process theory?

Answer 22

to occur in the S-R system and are activated every time (the same) eliciting stimuli are produced

Question 23

When are sensitisation processes assumed to occur in the dual-process theory?

Answer 23

assumed to occur in the state system, which activated only in presence of arousing stimuli

Question 24

Definition of biphasic?

Answer 24

one emotion during the eliciting stimulus and the opposite emotion when the stimulus is terminated

Question 25

What are intense emotional reactions considered?

Answer 25

biphasic

Question 26

What is the opponent process theory of motivation?

Answer 26

the brain avoids extremes of emotional experience by countering the stimulation it receives with an opposite or “opponent” reaction.

Question 27

What is emotional homeostasis?

Answer 27

is an attention-demanding feeling (e.g., thirst, pain, fatigue) evoked by an internal body state that drives behavior (drinking, withdrawing and resting in these examples) aimed at restoring the body to its ideal state.

Question 28

How is opponent process theory similar to dual process theory?

Answer 28

similar in assuming that an experienced event leads to two independent processes – such as two emotional processes; one that is pleasurable and one that is less pleasant

Question 29

What is novel object recognition task?

Answer 29

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 experiences with those objects

Question 30

Repeated experiences have different effects on the initial reaction versus the rebound reaction, causing the initial response to?

Answer 30

habituate faster than the rebound

Question 31

What is priming?

Answer 31

a phenomenon in which prior exposure to a stimulus can improve the ability to recognise the stimuli later

Question 32

How is priming in humans often studied?

Answer 32

using a word-stem completion task

Question 33

What is word-stem completion task?

Answer 33

a task in which participants are asked to fill in the blanks in a list of word stems (eg, MOT__) to produce the first word that comes to mind