ABSTRACT
Orienting and habituation have been important topics of investigation for over two decades. Initial interest following Sokolov’s (1960, 1963) early publications stemmed from the fact that the sensitivity of orienting to stimulus change seemed to carry implications for how sensory information was coded and processed. Orienting and habituation have now come to occupy a central position in the work of many behavioral scientists and neuroscientists for at least three reasons. First, orienting seems to be related to attentional processes, especially those processes that underlie passive attention to input (Graham & Hackley, 1991; Pavlov, 1927). This means that orienting can be used to study attention itself and to study attentional dysfunction in clinical or subclinical groups (e.g., Bernstein, 1992; Dawson, Nuechterlein, Schell, Gitlin, & Ventura, 1994). Second, habituation is an important aspect of behavioral plasticity (Groves & Thompson, 1970), and third, orienting and habituation can be observed across a wide range of vertebrate and invertebrate species and in a variety of response systems (see Campbell, Wood, & McBride, chapter 3, this volume). For these reasons, orienting and habituation have been subjected to intensive investigation, not only in their own right, but also in connection with theory development in areas such as cognitive development (Graham, Anthony, & Zeigler, 1983), associative learning (Pearce & Hall, 1980, 1992; Wagner, 1978), information processing (Öhman, 1979; Siddle & Spinks, 1992), psychopathology and emotion (Bernstein, 1992; Öhman, 1992), personality (O'Gorman, 1977), and the neuronal mechanisms of behavior (Carew, 1984).
