Two areas of research, fear conditioning and learned nonuse theory, provided substantive findings addressing these criteria.
Learned nonuse research addresses how damage to neural structure, the passage of time, and environmental context can affect behavior.
Through multiple elegant and innovative experimental demonstrations, the absence of purposeful behavior following unilateral deafferentation was attributed to postsurgical learned nonuse [20,24-28].
In some cases, the CIMT achieved voluntary purposeful behavior consistent with presurgical limb function, providing further support for Taub's hypothesis of learned nonuse.
The demonstration of time- and context-dependent learned nonuse is critical to Taub's research.
The evolution of scientific research for fear conditioning and learned nonuse illustrates the benefit of and need for increased elucidation of the complex effect(s) of time- and context-dependent variables on all behavior [1-3,7].
Learned nonuse provides specific illustration that surgically induced sensory neurological damage did not predict recovery of behavior.
Learned nonuse provides objective scientific understanding for why assumption based on neural pathway is insufficient to establish the specific relationships between fear, trauma, and subsequent behavior.
An operant approach to rehabilitation medicine: overcoming learned nonuse by shaping.
However, studies on conditioned suppression of movement, known as
learned nonuse (involving the paretic limb), led to the development of constraint-induced movement therapy (CI therapy).
