Orienting signifies "attention," not terror, in the standard lab situation, and its gradual elimination with repeated stimulus presentation is regarded as "habituation"-as something boring, akin to automatic acclimation, adjustment or desensitization. Habituation is not a passive process, however, at least at higher corticallevels of processing. It just looks passive when observed under relatively trivial circumstances. It is in reality always the consequence of active exploration and subsequent modification ofbehavior, or interpretive schema.
