“I wanted to be a scientist, a philosopher and a phychologist and I found i could be all of them at the sametime.”
This essay seeks to explain further the repetition/ familiarization principle.
Any concerns, refutation of claims please voice them.
Repetition
The repetition principle derives from the observation that the more a person performs a thought process (action) the action is then performed faster. (An action is defined as: something which is done with an effort (consumes energy)).
Observation
A person attends to school or any other educational institution where he is learning a foreign language. There he is exposed to the language for long periods of time. However, let us assume that he stops going to this institution for three years and he is not, for that space of time, exposed to the foreign language taught in the institution. The result will be that he will forget a great deal of what he had learned; however, he will find re-learning the foreign language easier and faster than learning it for the first time. A further example of this phenomenon would be a child learning simple arithmetic. At first, actions such as adding and multiplying will seem to take an effort. Nevertheless, over time these actions will seem effortless and people will be able to perform this once complicated process faster.
From this one can conclude that the more an action is performed the action in turn is done faster. The repetition principle thus is stated as: the more an action is performed the faster and with less perceived effort it will be performed.
Characteristics
The repetition principle in essence is a conceptualize notion of prior attempts to explain the above characteristic of human behavior. Prior experiments such as Ivan Pavlov’s experiment (Pavlov’s dog) demonstrate how when two sensorial stimuli are consistently perceived together they seem to become stronger in the person (animal) who is making the perception. A better simplification would be the later explanation known as Hebb´s rule which states: “Let us assume that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or “trace”) tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability.… When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A’s efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.”
This rule is often used to explain associative learning but it also has other ramification as a consequence the neurons that are fired together become “stronger” or as Hebb says they increase the efficiency of the pairing. This rule is thus often stated as: “Cells that fire together, wire together.” Or”If a synapse repeatedly becomes active at about the same time that the postsynaptic neuron fires, changes will take place in the structure or chemistry of the synapse that will strengthen it.”
Familiarization
The concept (principle) of repetition gives rise to the principle of familiarization. This principle states: Once a set of associations have become “stronger” (more efficient) through the process of repetition, the action (association) will take an effort not to be performed.
Observation
This principle stems from the following observation: let us take a person who has been living in a country using the regional accent moves to another location where it is not convenient for him to use the accent and therefore he has to stop using it. Every time he speaks and tries not to use the accent he will feel as though the action takes him an effort. Moreover if he loses concentration the accent may “slip” and without wanting to he will regress to speak with his native accent. This occurs because the person became familiarized with the accent and using the accent became almost second nature to the person to the extent that it will take a lot of effort to not use it. Although it is conceivable that with time the person might adapt to the accent used in the region, at first this is what would be observed.
From this it can be concluded that: an action (association) that has increased in efficiency (becomes stronger) would take an effort not to be performed (associated).
Characteristics
The familiarization principle obeys one simple rule: energy (neural impulses) will take the path of least resistance. As such for a person not to perform an action which he has become familiarized with, it will take him an effort not to perform it. In order words if unaffected by anything and assuming that nothing makes a person behave differently the action that are repeated are going to take place again. This is the principle that makes people fall into habits of behavior or what is known as personality which is defined as: familiarized actions, consistency of behavior. (It must be noticed that the familiarazation principle is a probability law and not an absolute statement.)
