Learning

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y to become familiar with a stimulus after repeated exposure to it. A common example of habituation occurs when a loud or sudden stimulus suddenly captures a person’s attention, but over time loses it power to be stimulated by this object. For example, a person who moves to a house on a busy street may initially be distracted (called the orienting response) every time a loud vehicle drives by. After living in the house for some time, however, the person will no longer be distracted by the street noise—the person becomes habituated to it and the orienting response disappears.
Habituation is a very useful type of learning. Because our environments are full of sights and sounds, we would waste a great amount of time and energy if we paid attention to every stimulus each time we encountered it. Habituation allows us to ignore repetitive, unimportant stimuli. Habituation occurs in nearly all, from human beings to animals with very simple nervous systems. Even some very small organisms will habituate to light, sound, or chemical stimulus that is presented repeatedly.
Sensitization, another form of learning,...