Motor Habituation: Theory and Experiment

Habituation is the phenomenon that responses to a stimulus weaken over repetitions. Because habituation is selective to the stimulus, it can be used to assess infant perception and cognition. Novelty preference is observed as dishabituation to stimuli that are sufficiently different from the stimulus to which an infant was first habituated. In many cases, there is also evidence for familiarity preference observed early during habituation. In motor development, perseveration, selecting a previously experienced movement over a novel one, is commonly observed. Perseveration may be thought of as analogous to familiarity preference. Is there also habituation to movement and does it induce novelty preference, observed as motor dishabituation? We apply the experimental paradigm of habituation to a motor task and provide experimental evidence for motor habituation, disha-bituation and Spencer-Thompson dishabituation. We account for this data in a neural dynamic model that unifies previous neural dynamic accounts for habituation and perseveration.