ABSTRACT
Although there is much recent research in the area of warnings, there is none that addresses the issue as to what happens to warning perception and compliant behaviour over time. Habituation to warnings is an area largely unexplored in the literature, and is the topic of this paper. Thorpe (1963, as cited in Petrinovich, 1973) defined habituation as “The relatively permanent waning of a response as a result of repeated stimulation which is not followed by any kind of reinforcement” (p. 141). This lack of reinforcement could be an issue with visual warnings in particular, firstly because they may not be relevant all of the time, and secondly if the hazard does not become apparent then the warning sign is not reinforced. The memory theory of habituation (Sokolov, 1963, cited in Schwartz and Robbins, 1995) proposed that “…perceived stimuli are passed through a ‘comparator’ that checks to see if a representation of the event already exists in memory. If such a memory is present, the stimulus is afforded no further processing and no responding occurs” (p.50). Wagner (1976, cited in Schwartz and Robbins, 1995) furthered Sokolov’s memory theory of habituation and suggested that knowledge is held in either short-term memory (STM) or long-term memory (LTM). If information is held in STM it is in an ‘active’ state and results in little or no response to a stimulus, whereas information held in LTM is in an ‘inactive’ state and the presence of a stimulus will
provoke a response. It was hypothesised that following repeated exposure to a visual warning without
reinforcement, behavioural compliance would decrease as a function of time. Moreover, changing the warning to another that differed in appearance, but not in intensity, would dishabituate the existing response and increase compliant behaviour.
