ABSTRACT
That this volume joins two recent and important collections of papers (Horne & Hinde, 1970; Peeke & Herz, 1973) on the topic of habituation, with contributions from a diverse assemblage of investigators, leads one to surmise that the phenomenon is enjoying increased research attention. From the point of view of animal learning theory this attention has been long overdue as habituation has been left largely outside the scope of the major theories and their preoccupation with Pavlovian and Thorndikian conditioning. Attempts to provide some theoretical integration of habituation with other learning phenomena have been rare and then have typically expressed the biases of prevailing conditioning theory, for example, the occasional proposal that habituation may be due solely to hidden Pavlovian contingencies (e.g., Stein, 1966) or that it may bear uncertain similarities to the response decrement that occurs in experimental extinction of a conditioned response (see Kling & Stevenson, 1970).
