Habituation Essay

With these ideas in mind, explore your surroundings (home, school, bank, church, pub, etc.) for a behavior that fits the definition of habituation or sensitization.After completing the exercise, I discovered an example of a behavior in my home that fulfills the description of sensitization. It might not be human behavior, but rather cat behavior. My brother had the cat, and he used to come home every day with some cat food. The cat got accustomed to my brother bringing it food everyday and seems that cat always associated my brother with food. Thus, whenever another person was approaching the house, the cat did not do anything. However, whenever my brother was approaching the house, the cat would run towards the door ready to welcome him and hoping to get the food. This behavior of the cat fits that of sensitization as it associated the smell of my brother with the smell of food. The experience at first was that my brother came with cat food that aroused it and later it led to stronger responses to the smell of my brother as it was being associated with cat food.

In the case of sensitization, does it show "evidence for increased nervous system sensitization" as indicated by Pitman et al. (2012)?

Pitman et al. (2012) assert that evidence for increased nervous sensitization for their study “comes from findings of larger heart rate responses to loud-tone stimuli and larger skin conductance orientation responses.” The behavior of the cat did not show this evidence but it showed that it was sensitive to the smell of my brother. This is proved by the fact that it always ran towards the door when it sensed that my brother was approaching. However, when it was somebody else, it just stayed out and mostly remained where it was.