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Heart‐rate and electrodermal orienting responses to visual stimuli differing in complexity
Author(s) -
FREDRIKSON MATS,
ÖHMAN ARNE
Publication year - 1979
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.1979.tb00680.x
Subject(s) - habituation , orienting response , skin conductance , stimulus (psychology) , psychology , heart rate , audiology , visual perception , neuroscience , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , perception , medicine , blood pressure , biomedical engineering
Orienting response (OR) theory predicts that amount of information in the stimulus, or stimulus complexity, should be an important determinant of OR elicitation and habituation, more intense and more slowly habituating ORs being expected to complex than to simple stimuli. This prediction was tested in an experiment where subjects were exposed to simple and complex visual stimuli in randomized order, while heart‐rate and skin conductance were measured. Complex stimuli evoked a more pronounced deceleratory heartrate response than did simple stimuli. However, the two conditions did not differ in rate of habituation of this response. For skin conductance responses, on the other hand, the complex stimulus took more trials than the simple stimulus to reach habituation, whereas the two conditions did not differ in response magnitude. Thus, the hypothesis of more intense orienting to complex stimuli was supported by the heart‐rate data, and that of slower habituation to complex stimuli, of the skin conductance data.