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Experimental Assessments of the Importance of Controlling for Contingency Factors in Human Classical Differential Electrodermal and Plethysmographic Conditioning
Author(s) -
Furedy John J.
Publication year - 1974
Publication title -
psychophysiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.661
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1469-8986
pISSN - 0048-5772
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-8986.1974.tb00549.x
Subject(s) - contingency , distraction , psychology , plethysmograph , conditioning , skin conductance , audiology , cognitive psychology , social psychology , statistics , mathematics , cardiology , medicine , epistemology , philosophy , biomedical engineering
The importance of contingency factors implies the contingency prediction: that if CS+:CS‐ discrimination is obtained in a two‐groups design where the control CS‐ stimulus for the two groups, respectively, is arranged to have a negative (nCS‐) CS‐US contingency (so‐called “explicitly‐unpaired” CS) and a zero (zCS‐) CS‐US contingency (so‐called “truly‐random” CS), then discrimination in the nCS‐ group will exceed that in the zCS‐ group. This implication was tested and disconfirmed for the electrodermal skin resistance response in three 5‐sec delay‐conditioning experiments (N = 48, 32, and 16, respectively), and for plethysmographic digital pulse‐volume change in an 8‐sec delay‐conditioning experiment (N = 48). Since both the discrimination manipulation (CS+ vs CS‐) and, in one experiment, a distraction manipulation (presence vs absence of a distraction task) were shown to be effective, while the contingency manipulation (nCS‐ vs zCS‐) had no autonomic effects in any of the experiments, it was concluded that while contingency factors as represented by the difference between nCS‐ and zCS‐ have an obvious logical significance, in human autonomic conditioning, the nCS‐:CS‐ difference is of negligible empirical importance.