If you manage to make it to more than one firework show in a single night, you may find that you habituate faster at the second, third, fourth, and subsequent shows. Potentiation of habituation: Habituation of the response to the stimulus happens faster each time.If you only see one firework show a year you may find that your startle response is back to its high point for the first firework of the show each year.

Spontaneous recovery: the response to the stimulus will recover if the stimulus is absent for a period.

As the fireworks continue, your reactions may get smaller and smaller until you don’t feel at all surprised or startled by the explosions. The first firework of the night may cause you to jump out of your seat. The response may never fully go away but may instead approach some minimum.

The affected dimension may be the frequency, probability, duration, or magnitude of the response. Repeated presentations of a stimulus decrease some dimension of the response to that stimulus.Psychologists who study habituation have identified ten characteristics that define habituation (Rankin et al., 2009). Although scientists and philosophers have been writing about the phenomenon of habituation for centuries (Thompson, 2009), it wasn’t formally defined until 1966 (Thompson & Spencer, 1966).

Reactivity aba definition