Ignoring the Innocuous: The Neural Mechanisms of Habituation

TY - CHAP

T1 - Ignoring the Innocuous: The Neural Mechanisms of Habituation

AU - Cooke, Samuel

AU - Ramaswami, Mani

PY - 2020/4/1

Y1 - 2020/4/1

N2 - Habituation is a form of learning that reduces behavioral responses to stimuli experienced repeatedly without reward or punishment. This fundamental form of learning is exhibited by a wide range of organisms. Habituation enables energy and attention to be devoted to stimuli that have already been established to be meaningful, as well as to novel stimuli that may merit exploration or avoidance due to their potential to deliver reward or punishment. The detection of novelty requires memory for all things familiar, a lasting neural imprint revealed as behavioral habituation. Great difficulties arise for organisms that are unable to ignore familiar and innocuous elements of the environment due the failure of habituation. Significantly, such difficulties are apparent across a range of psychiatric disorders. Early studies of habituation focussed on accessible sensorimotor circuits have recently been extended through several direct studies of how habituation processes are implemented via neural plasticity in the central nervous system. Together, these indicate that patterns of neural excitation triggered by novel stimuli can be attenuated with familiarity through the build-up of matching patterns of inhibition. Here we provide an integrated summary of current understanding of habituation, familiarity and novelty detection and discuss questions that remain to be answered.

AB - Habituation is a form of learning that reduces behavioral responses to stimuli experienced repeatedly without reward or punishment. This fundamental form of learning is exhibited by a wide range of organisms. Habituation enables energy and attention to be devoted to stimuli that have already been established to be meaningful, as well as to novel stimuli that may merit exploration or avoidance due to their potential to deliver reward or punishment. The detection of novelty requires memory for all things familiar, a lasting neural imprint revealed as behavioral habituation. Great difficulties arise for organisms that are unable to ignore familiar and innocuous elements of the environment due the failure of habituation. Significantly, such difficulties are apparent across a range of psychiatric disorders. Early studies of habituation focussed on accessible sensorimotor circuits have recently been extended through several direct studies of how habituation processes are implemented via neural plasticity in the central nervous system. Together, these indicate that patterns of neural excitation triggered by novel stimuli can be attenuated with familiarity through the build-up of matching patterns of inhibition. Here we provide an integrated summary of current understanding of habituation, familiarity and novelty detection and discuss questions that remain to be answered.

KW - Habituation

KW - Memory

KW - Learning

KW - Novelty

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9780262043250

SP - 197

BT - The Cognitive Neurosciences

A2 - Poeppel, David

A2 - Mangun, George

A2 - Gazzaniga, Michael

PB - MIT Press

CY - Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

ER -