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Cardiac Deceleration and Reflex Blink Facilitation
Author(s) -
Bohlin Gunilla,
Graham Frances K.
Publication year - 1977
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.1469-8986.1977.tb01306.x
Subject(s) - psychology , facilitation , stimulus (psychology) , orienting response , reflex , moro reflex , audiology , stimulation , corneal reflex , habituation , developmental psychology , neuroscience , cognitive psychology , medicine
Theories differ in their predictions of how skeletal reflex activity should vary with cardiac deceleration, an index of orienting. Although Graham (1975) reported that reflex blinking was facilitated under uncertainty conditions eliciting cardiac deceleration, theoretical implications remained unclear. Graham hypothesized that facilitation was not due to orienting per se but to rebound when orienting was terminated by the blink‐eliciting stimulus. This hypothesis was tested in the present research by manipulation of attentional requirements. In Experiment 1, 24 undergraduates received identical stimulation but half made an attention‐focusing discrimination between durations of noise startle stimuli and thus maintained attention on the stimulus past the time of reflex initiation; half of the subjects discriminated durations of non‐startling tones and thus could terminate orienting when a noise stimulus occurred. In both groups, orienting was induced by a lead stimulus that was followed equally often by noise and tone. The hypothesis was disconfirmed. Blinks were equally facilitated in both groups compared to no‐lead stimulus control trials. A second experiment, designed to induce more persistent cardiac deceleration under maintained attention conditions, produced similar results.