Читать книгу Animal Behavior for Shelter Veterinarians and Staff - Группа авторов - Страница 84

Habituation is a type of non‐associative learning in which an animal stops or reduces its response to a stimulus after repeated exposure to that stimulus. Consider Brutus, a terrier who barks at the sound of a lawn mower buzzing outside. As soon as the lawn mower turns on, Brutus barks wildly at the new sound. However, after a few minutes of the lawn mower continuously buzzing, Brutus calms down. In this example, the lawn mower buzz is the stimulus that elicits the response of barking. The response eventually stops even though the stimulus is still present in the animal’s environment. Brutus habituates to the buzzing. Essentially, he gets used to it. Habituation to the sound occurred without any other stimulus present in Brutus’s environment. The process of habituation is used widely to reduce animals’ fear response to harmless stimuli.

Sensitization is the opposite of habituation in that repeated exposure to a stimulus increases an animal’s response to the stimulus. As a new dog owner, Ruth had no idea that dogs can be so deathly terrified of fireworks. She naively took her Lhasa apso, Scruffy, to see fireworks to celebrate the New Year. When the fireworks started, Scruffy started to nervously pace around and pant heavily. Even though Ruth tried to calm her down by petting her and holding her close, it was no use. As the fireworks continued, she became increasingly nervous. After just a few minutes, Scruffy somehow got out of her collar and ran away into the crowd (Ruth found Scruffy shortly after, of course). Ruth expected Scruffy to habituate to the sound, but instead, she became sensitized to it. The presence of other stimuli was not relevant to Scruffy learning to become more and more sensitized to the noise. Her response to the stimulus became more intense as the stimulus continued to be present in her environment.