Latent Inhibition:

"When individuals are repeatedly exposed to a stimulus without consequence or reinforcement, they learn future associations to that stimulus more slowly. This phenomenon, known as latent inhibition (LI), has been extensively studied and appears robust across a variety of mammalian species, including mice, rabbits, cats, and humans (Lubow & Gewirtz, 1995). There are several explanations for the latent inhibition effect (Schmajuk, Lam & Gray, 1996). Weiner, Shadach, Tarrach and Kidron (1996) suggested that repeated pre-exposure to a non-reinforced stimulus allows the individual to process that stimulus at a preconscious level and to categorize it as currently irrelevant so that it may be consciously ignored. Pre-exposure without reinforcement reduces the novelty of the stimulus and its associated capacity to attract attention (Gray & McNaughton, 1996). This ability to ignore a non-reinforced stimulus is a biologically adaptive function of implicit attention (Lubow & Gewirtz, 1995) which allows an individual to 'gate', or keep out of conscious awareness stimuli irrelevant to survival or to present goal attainment."

Jordan B. Peterson, Shelley Carson

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Swerdlow NR et al.:

"Latent inhibition (LI) refers to the retarded acquisition of a conditioned response that occurs if the subject being tested is first preexposed to the to-be-conditioned stimulus (CS) without the paired unconditioned stimulus (UCS). Because the 'irrelevance' of the to-be-conditioned stimulus is established during non-contingent preexposure, the slowed acquisition of the CS-UCS association is thought to reflect the process of overcoming this learned irrelevance."

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Hans Eysenck:

"Latent inhibition is defined by an experimental paradigm which requires, as a minimum, a two-stage procedure. The first stage involves stimulus pre-exposure, i.e. the to-be-CS (conditioned stimulus) is exhibited without being followed by any unconditioned stimulus (UCS); this leads theoretically to the CS acquiring a negative salience, i.e. it signals a lack of consequences, and thus acquires inhibitory properties."

"The cognitive elements in latent inhibition theory are emphasized by Lubow (1989) in terms of his conditioned attention theory. According to this theory, non-reinforced pre-exposure to a stimulus retards subsequent conditioning to that stimulus because during such pre-exposure the subject learns not to attend to it."

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Webcache - lowlatentinhibition.org:

"Latent inhibition is a term used to explain how our observation of a familiar stimulus (e.g. something we see, hear, smell, feel or taste that we’ve had before) takes longer to acquire meaning than a new stimulus. It’s essentially a mental tool you develop in order to experience the world in a manageable way."

"For example, consider how you experience a doorknob. You are familiar with door handles and how they work, what the purpose of them is and in most cases a door handle wouldn’t interest you enough for you to pay it any notice. Why should you? You know how they work already and have seen them before."

"With low latent inhibition, an individual almost treats familiar stimuli in the same manner as they would new stimuli. Think of the details you notice when you see something new for the first time and how it grabs your attention."

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Colin DeYoung:

"Latent inhibition is an automatic pre-conscious process that blocks stimuli previously categorized as irrelevant from entering awareness. Dopamine appears to be the primary neuromodulator of latent inhibition, with increased dopaminergic activity producing reduced latent inhibition (Kumari et al., 1999)."

"latent inhibition, an automatic process by which stimuli previously categorized as irrelevant are blocked from entering consciousness."

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S. H. Carson et al.:

"Creative individuals appear characterized in part by the ability to perceive and describe what remains hidden from the view of others. Individual variation in latent inhibition (LI), a cognitive inhibitory mechanism discovered by animal experimentalists in the late 1950s, may account for the apparent revelation to the creative mind of what appears “clos’d by the senses five” to others. LI refers to the varying capacity of the brain to screen from current attentional focus stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant (Lubow, 1989)."

"Many researchers (e.g., Simonton, 1988, 1999) have proposed that the cognitive processes of individuals capable of creating the highest achievements in their fields are both qualitatively and quantitatively different from those of normal thinkers (although some, like Weisberg, 1993, dispute the “qualitative” distinction). If qualitative differences do exist, however, one potential source of difference in the cognitive processes between eminent creative achievers and other intelligent thinkers may be in the relative attenuation of LI."