Specific and Non-Specific Traits of Habituation in Nystagmus Responses to Caloric Stimuli

Abstract

In human subjects, the electronystagmographically recorded responses to repeated monolabyrinthine caloric stimuli are shown to be influenced by specific (discriminative) processes as well as by alerting (arousal).

The response decline to repeated stimuli is more pronounced with identical stimuli than with stimuli that are of equal average intensity but differ in regard to their quality (cold-warm) and/or localization (right-left labyrinth). This is not due to variations in the general activation level (as reflected in the electrical skin resistance and in the electroencephalogram).

Thus, the habituation process seems to be specifically linked to the direction of the cupular deflexion in the individual labyrinth, or to conscious discrimination between changes in the experimental situation as a whole.