Introduction
Habituation: The Foundation of Learning and Attention was an Exploratory Workshop, funded by a grant from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia, awarded to Principal Investigator Catharine Rankin, Psychology.
The simplest form of learning is habituation. In habituation an organisms learns to ignore stimuli that have no meaning, stimuli that do not indicate that anything (good or bad) will happen. Habituation in seen as the simplest form of processing or filtering information in the environment. Organisms do not have enough processing capacity to give equal attention to every sensory input they receive, so they must be able to filter out, or ignore some stimuli. This might be the sound of the wind in the leaves of the tree, the babbling of the brook, or the sounds of the breathing of self or neighbours. It might be the feeling of clothes on our bodies, the sound of traffic outside our homes, or the rims of our glasses.
Habituation has been seen in all organisms; studies, from single-celled paramecium to humans. The characteristics of habituation are the same in all organisms studied. Despite it’s apparent simplicity, and it’s importance for survival, remarkably little is known about the mechanisms of this process. We do know that several human disorders are accompanied by altered habituation, these include schizophrenia and migraine headaches.
This workshop on habituation brought together people who have studied habituation directly or who have used habituation as part of their research to develop a synthesis of what was known about habituation and where habituation research should go next.
