The Sometimes Context-Specific Habituation: Theoretical Challenges to Associative Accounts

SIMPLE SUMMARY: When a stimulus occurs repeatedly without significant consequences, animals tend to decrease their responses to that stimulus. This phenomenon, known as habituation, can be explained by a class of theories that posit that expected events are less effective in provoking their responses than unexpected events. According to Allan Wagner’s priming theory, one of the ways this expectation might happen is via associative learning between the stimulus and the context in which stimulation occurred. In this article, we summarize a few theoretical complexities that derive from this approach along with some relevant empirical questions that remain open to further research. ABSTRACT: A substantial corpus of experimental research indicates that in many species, long-term habituation appears to depend on context–stimulus associations. Some authors have recently emphasized that this type of outcome supports Wagner’s priming theory, which affirms that responding is diminished when the eliciting stimulus is predicted by the context where the animal encountered that stimulus in the past. Although we agree with both the empirical reality of the phenomenon as well as the principled adequacy of the theory, we think that the available evidence is more provocative than conclusive and that there are a few nontrivial empirical and theoretical issues that need to be worked out by researchers in the future. In this paper, we comment on these issues within the framework of a quantitative version of priming theory, the SOP model.