How to Use habituation in a Sentence

habituation

noun
  • This process, known as ‘habituation’, applies to all sorts of things – bright lights, level of wealth and, yes, the taste of food.
    — Andrew Moseman, Discover Magazine, 10 Dec. 2010
  • At first, scenes such as this one took place only in enclosures, part of a process of training and habituation for the dogs.
    — Anthony Ham, Smithsonian Magazine, 18 Nov. 2021
  • The team plans to look at how animals get used to recreational noises over time — a term called habituation.
    — Elizabeth Walsh, Idaho Statesman, 9 July 2024
  • The frog uses the fact of habituation to distinguish the parts of the environment that are live, that are moving.
    — Joshua Barone, New York Times, 2 Nov. 2022
  • Southwest Wildlife workers take care to limit the cubs’ contact with humans to avoid habituation.
    — Shi En Kim, AZCentral.com, 20 Feb. 2026
  • There is the rush, the perhaps unconscious desire to replicate the rush, and there is habituation and addiction.
    — Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Times, 6 Mar. 2024
  • Are some groups of people more susceptible to habituation than others?
    — Andrew Limbong, NPR, 26 June 2024
  • The habituation process isn’t always smooth and straightforward.
    — Literary Hub, 13 Feb. 2026
  • If this happens again, hazing to preclude them from causing damage and habituation is encouraged.
    — Mike Wehner, BGR, 5 May 2021
  • If this happens again, hazing to preclude them from causing damage and habituation is encouraged.
    — Alex Fox, Smithsonian Magazine, 7 May 2021
  • One person’s beloved smell can provoke disgust in someone else, and vice-versa, based largely on habituation and cultural norms.
    — Popular Science, 18 Sep. 2020
  • This argues against any big habituation effect that dulls caffeine’s benefits with regular use.
    — Alex Hutchinson, Outside Online, 11 Apr. 2019
  • But through habituation, or paucity of talent, or lack of originality, most of us, writing, reach for the most workaday speech-tools, and in this way the world is made dull.
    — George Saunders, The New Yorker, 3 Mar. 2017
  • The researchers wanted to see if age, habituation, or training influenced the dog's tendency to follow a human's gaze.
    — Enikő Kubinyi, National Geographic, 31 Aug. 2016
  • The authors gauged the workings of those baby brains indirectly, by taking advantage of a process called habituation.
    — Bill Andrews, Discover Magazine, 7 Feb. 2019
  • Sometimes habituation can take a while, and that means a large primate occasionally comes barreling through the forest towards her.
    — Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover Magazine, 14 Apr. 2022
  • In the town every other house is a clandestine distillery; and in the Indian village every habituation is one.
    — Craig Medred, Anchorage Daily News, 4 Sep. 2013
  • The objective of the study was to evaluate in humans the effect of disruption of habituation by alternation between foods in a meal.
    — Ncbi Rofl, Discover Magazine, 16 Apr. 2013
  • Exposure therapy is fairly intuitive; each session is akin to the habituation that comes after jumping into a cold pool.
    — Virginia Hughes Desiree Rios, New York Times, 21 Nov. 2022
  • But when food conditioning and habituation make bears more comfortable around humans, attacks become more likely.
    — Katie Hill, Outdoor Life, 8 June 2023
  • Too much confusion or too much habituation won’t work; confusion and habituation must be balanced.
    — Jason Karp, Outside Online, 12 Jan. 2021
  • This type of habituation is a particular problem, state wildlife authorities say, and officials are still grappling with how to approach the issue.
    — Louis Sahagún, Los Angeles Times, 18 Mar. 2024
  • Responding less and less to stimuli that repeat is a human phenomenon that social scientists call habituation.
    — Jessica Dulong, CNN, 23 Feb. 2024
  • One fact of long-term relationships, in research terms, is habituation—the diminished response to your significant other’s actions over time.
    — Paul Nicolaus, The Atlantic, 21 June 2021
  • The sounds of underwater pile-driving elicit signs of both alarm and habituation in longfin squid, and the medium-term stress level of fish can be determined by plucking their scales and testing for cortisol.
    — Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Harper's magazine, 2 Mar. 2020
  • The sounds of underwater pile-driving elicit signs of both alarm and habituation in longfin squid, and the medium-term stress level of fish can be determined by plucking their scales and testing for cortisol.
    — Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Harper's Magazine, 30 Mar. 2020
  • And any habituation leaves the animals more vulnerable to harassment and stress from less responsible people.
    — Cathleen O'Grady, Smithsonian Magazine, 22 July 2020
  • Krasznahorkai’s work throws an obstacle in front of our habituation to violence and war by showing us that what should be surreal or impossible has, in fact, become our reality.
    — Walt Hunter, The Atlantic, 9 Oct. 2025
  • Other experiments have traced the acquisition of habituation in the gill withdrawal reflex of the sea slug Aplysia to changes in individual cells.
    — Jennifer Frazer, Scientific American, 28 May 2021
  • The capability for suicide is fostered by a habituation to pain and violence, say academics and clinicians, and then facilitated by a technical knowledge of how to use lethal weapons.
    — Jose A. Del Real, Washington Post, 23 May 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'habituation.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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