Not every learned change is habituation
- The idea
- Predict
- See it
- Why
- Check
The idea
“If an animal acts differently after something happens over and over, that's habituation.”
Habituation needs repetition, and so do a lot of other kinds of learning. So the one word gets stretched over every change.
The short version
The mistake: If an animal acts differently after something happens over and over, that's habituation.
What's actually true: Habituation is only a response fading because a harmless stimulus keeps repeating.
- Habituation is a drop in response to a stimulus that keeps repeating and brings nothing good or bad. The animal stops spending energy on it.
- In associative learning, an animal links a cue or an action with an outcome. That covers learning to seek a reward and learning to avoid harm.
On the exam: Call it habituation only if a response faded and the repeated stimulus was harmless.