Monotony and Uncertainty in the Habituation of the Orienting Reflex

The use of nontechnical, everyday language and concepts in the description and analysis of technical psychological subject matter is at best a risky practice. The literature dealing with the orienting reflex (OR) in humans provides many examples of the use of terminology that is quite frankly borrowed from the ordinary, nonscientific language and applied to the technical subject matter of psychophysiology. This chapter shows that a simplistic, cognitive approach to the topic of habituation of the OR in humans, one that utilizes terminology and concepts from the everyday, commonsense language, is demonstrably inadequate to predict or comprehend a wide variety of relatively simple empirical facts. Although the initial impression is often optimistic, this positive outlook changes quickly to a negative one when anything beyond the most elementary implications of the simplistic approach are put to empirical test.