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

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.

Keywords

• habituation
• context–specificity
• contextual learning
• priming theory
• animal learning
• SOP