An investigation of stimulus-specificity in long-term habituation
Date
1982
Authors
Van Doren, Jon J. (Jon Jay)
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Abstract
It has been established that, with stimulus change, the degree of orienting-response recovery from short-term habituation (i.e., habituation within a single stimulus series) is positively correlated with degree of stimulus change. The present study presents an attempt to explicate the stimulus-specific nature of long-term habituation (i.e., habituation retained across stimulus series). To this end, four groups of twenty subjects were provided with two experimental "sessions", separated ty ten minutes. Across three groups, the degree of intersessional stimulus-similarity was varied, being either identical (Group 4), intramodally different (Group 3), or intermodally different (Group 2). To determine to what extent the presentation of any stimulus series in Part A is necessary for a lowering of responding in Part E, Group 1 was given a stimulus series only in Part B. Occurrence of the orienting response was measured via changes in skin conductance, and two measures of long-term habituation were employed: the magnitude of response to the initial stimulus of Fart E and the number of trials responded to before reaching an habituation criterion of three consecutive nonresponses.
Three measures of tonic arousal were employed: frequency of fluctuations in skin conductance, skin conductance level, and heart rate level. Neither evidence for non-stimulus-specific influences nor for intermodal generalization of long-term habituation obtained, though these results were somewhat equivocal since the measures of long-term habituation may have been confounded by the differing response-eliciting properties of the various stimuli employed it Part A. Evidence for intramodal generalization was found with initial response magnitude but not with trials-to-criterion, suggesting that initial response magnitude is the more sensitive measure of LTH. Both measures of LTH shewed a decrement across sessions with repetition of an identical stimulus.