Latent inhibition

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Latent inhibition (LI) is a technical term in classical conditioning, where a familiar stimulus takes longer to acquire meaning (as a signal or conditioned stimulus) than a new stimulus.^[1] The term originated with Lubow and Moore in 1973.^[2] The LI effect is latent in that it is not exhibited in the stimulus pre-exposure phase, but rather in the subsequent test phase. "Inhibition", here, simply connotes that the effect is expressed in terms of relatively poor learning. The LI effect is extremely robust, appearing in both invertebrate (for example, honey bees^[3]) and mammalian species that have been tested and across many different learning paradigms, thereby suggesting some adaptive advantages, such as protecting the organism from associating irrelevant stimuli with other, more important, events.