Final answer:
The learned ability to respond differently to various stimuli is known as stimulus discrimination, a process where an organism learns to distinguish and react to a specific conditioned stimulus among similar ones.
Step-by-step explanation:
The learned ability to respond differently to various stimuli is known as stimulus discrimination. This learning process is crucial for organisms to make distinctions between similar stimuli and respond appropriately. For example, in classical conditioning, an organism like Pavlov's dogs will respond only to the conditioned stimulus (like a tone before feeding) and not to other similar, non-conditioned stimuli (like a doorbell), because they've learned the latter does not predict food. On the contrary, stimulus generalization occurs when an organism reacts with a conditioned response to stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus, which is the opposite of discrimination. However, with training, an organism can learn to discriminate between these stimuli if they are paired with different outcomes (like feeding after a can opener sound but not after a mixer sound).