Tuning Out the World: The Neural Correlates of the Habituation of Higher-Level Cognitions
Bella Benzaken
Department of Psychology
Faculty Supervisor: Ezequiel Morsella
When we are repeatedly presented with the same stimulus, our response to it often decreases as a function of repeated exposure. For example, when you first moved into your house, you may have noticed the constant hum of your refrigerator, but over time, you became accustomed to that sound. The hum never disappeared, but it is as if your brain ‘turned down the volume’, so you did not notice it anymore. This basic form of learning is known as “habituation”. It occurs for simple behavioral responses and even for higher-level, cognitive phenomena (Bhangal et al., 2016). It remains unclear exactly what changes in the brain when we ‘tune out’ not only external stimuli, but our own involuntary mental responses. We conducted an electroencephalography (EEG) study (n = 38) to investigate the changes in alpha, beta, and theta frequencies in frontal and parietal regions as people habituated their mental responses to visual stimuli. In a “habituation variant” of the Reflexive Imagery Task, each stimulus was presented ten times, consecutively, to induce habituation of the mental response (involuntary subvocalization). We hypothesized that any habituation observed would be associated with increased alpha and decreased beta frequencies in frontal and parietal regions. This work may illuminate neural mechanisms underlying attentional filtering disorders.