A between-subjects design (N=60) was used to investigate the effects of electrodermal lability and auditory stimulus intensity on habituation of the skin conductance response (SCR). Subjects were subdivided into "labile" and "stabile" groups on the basis of frequency of nonspecific electrodermal responses during the prestimulation period. They received 20 presentations of a 1,OOo-Hz tone of 15,...

When repeatedly elicited, the oscillatory escape swim of the marine mollusc Tritonia diomedea undergoes habituation of the number of cycles per swim. Although similar in most respects to habituation observed in vertebrates and other invertebrates, one key feature, dishabituation, has been surprisingly difficult to demonstrate. Here we evaluate the hypothesis that this is due to interference fro...

Little is known about the development of the skin conductance orienting response (SCOR) in childhood. This longitudinal study examines the effects of age on initial SCOR, habituation, and reorienting. Skin conductance responses to nonsignal auditory stimuli were recorded from 200 male and female children at five different time points (ages 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 years). Longitudinal latent growth cu...

Many studies of the neural mechanisms of learning have focused on habituation, a simple form of learning in which a response decrements with repeated stimulation. In the siphon-elicited siphon withdrawal reflex (S-SWR) of the marine mollusk Aplysia, the prevailing view is that homosynaptic depression of primary sensory afferents underlies short-term habituation. Here we examined whether this me...

Recurrent inhibition, wherein excitatory principal neurons stimulate inhibitory interneurons that feedback on the same principal cells, occurs ubiquitously in the brain. However, the regulation and function of recurrent inhibition are poorly understood in terms of the contributing interneuron subtypes as well as their effect on neural and cognitive outputs. In the Drosophila olfactory system, o...