Simulation of habituation to simple and multiple stimuli

Abstract

Within the psychological literature there are a number of models that reproduce the defining properties of habituation to a single stimulus. However, most of them do not reproduce the phenomenon of dishabituation shown in empirical studies, consisting in the recovery of a stimulus previously habituated upon the appearance of a novel stimulus. The present work offers a model of habituation which, in addition to reproducing the basic properties of habituation to a stimulus, also does so when more than one stimulus is presented, and thus includes the dishabituation phenomenon. This model consists of two functions, one called "activation" and the other "availability", and is tested by means of simulation of the responses in the context of different stimulus patterns. The results of the simulation show a good qualitative fit to the empirical results on the phenomena of habituation, including dishabituation. In addition, the model is suitable for inclusion in associative models that reproduce classical conditioning, which will make it possible in the future to incorporate into these the influence that the habituation of each stimulus may have on its association with other stimuli.

Modeling novelty habituation during exploratory activity in Drosophila

“…Previous habituation studies at neurophysiological and psychological levels have also attempted to understand the mechanisms underlying habituation through mathematical models of habituation [9–11,14,17,19]. These models take an input in the form of one or multiple stimuli repeatedly applied to a system and generate an output in the form of a response function which decays from a high to a stable level with the decrease in novelty of the stimuli.…”

A Review of the Relationship between Novelty, Intrinsic Motivation and Reinforcement Learning

“…That is, on presentation of stimuli or pattern, novelty detection (ND) system identifies the pattern as novel or not novel when data distribution (class or pattern) goes beyond a threshold value as illustrated in Figure 1(b). Also, it has been observed in human and animals and also verified experimentally by psychologists that repeated exposure to stimuli decreases responsiveness [21,22] and over a period of time the repeating stimuli is no longer novel. That is, the novelty signal is continuous, gradually increases with time and reaches its highest value that continues for a certain period depending on the complexity of the stimuli and then decreases.…”

“…It is a widely studied type of behavioural plasticity [26]. The characteristic features of habituation as identified by researchers [21,23,24,26] are: exponential decrease of the response with repeated exposure to a stimulus, faster habituation with lower intensity stimuli, faster habituation with shorter intervals between stimuli, spontaneous recovery of the response after a period of break and recovery of the response or dishabituation of the stimuli previously habituated upon the introduction of a new stimulus. Various models have been proposed that reproduce the characteristic features of habituation [26][27][28][29][30].…”

Habituation: a non-associative learning rule design for spiking neurons and an autonomous mobile robots implementation

“…In addition, habituation is also locus specific [6,20] and depends on the stimulus modality, the modality's field width, neuron properties and the complexity of the circuit involved. Habituation can also be obtained from different concomitant input modalities and multiple stimuli [21]. Furthermore, it depends on the exact developmental stage of natural organisms [22].…”