Neural Correlates of Habituation in the Reflexive Imagery Task
Bella Benzaken
Department of Psychology
Faculty Supervisor: Ezequiel Morsella
When an organism is presented with the same stimulus repeatedly, the response to the stimulus can decrease as a function of the number of presentations. For example, the sound of a car engine might startle an animal at first, but then the animal becomes accustomed to the sound. This basic form of learning is called “habituation.” It occurs for simple behavioral responses and also for higher-level, cognitive phenomena. To investigate the neural correlates of habituation in humans, we are conducting a replication and extension of the “habituation variant” of the Reflexive Imagery Task. During each experimental trial, the participant (n > 30) will be presented with an image of a familiar object (e.g., a line drawing of a star) and instructed not to think of the name of the object (the targeted mental operation). In each trial, the same stimulus will be presented ten times, consecutively, in order to habituate the targeted mental response (as was found in Bhangal et al., 2016). Electroencephalography will be used to investigate the neural correlates of the habituation. We will focus on key frontal (F3, F4) and parietal (P3, P4) regions, with a focus on specific frequency bands (alpha, beta, theta) known to be associated with cognitive control. We hypothesize that any habituation observed will be associated with increased alpha frequencies and decreased beta frequencies in the frontal and parietal regions.
Reference Bhangal, S., Allen, A. K., Geisler, M. W., & Morsella, E. (2016). Conscious contents as reflexive processes: Evidence from the habituation of high-level cognitions. Consciousness and Cognition, 41, 177–188. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.02.012