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Relative Discriminability of Heartbeat‐Contingent Stimuli Under Three Procedures for Assessing Cardiac Perception
Author(s) -
Davis Mark R.,
Langer Alan W.,
Sutterer James R.,
Gelling Paul D.,
Marlin Michelle
Publication year - 1986
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.1469-8986.1986.tb00598.x
Subject(s) - heartbeat , psychology , perception , audiology , knowledge of results , cognitive psychology , neuroscience , computer science , medicine , computer security , management , economics , task (project management)
The purpose of this study was to compare the relative discriminability of heartbeat detection tasks described by Whitehead, Drescher, Heiman, and Blackwell (1977) and Katkin, Morell, Goldband, and Bernstein (1980) with a third procedure designed to capitalize on the strengths of the other two. One‐hundred‐and‐eight subjects were given 2 blocks of 25 trials in which they attempted to discriminate whether a short train of auditory and visual pulses were contiguous with their ongoing cardiac activity. Subjects were divided into three experimental groups. When subjects were tested without knowledge of results (KR), all three procedures yielded approximately similar discrimination performances, with only the new procedure significantly exceeding that expected by chance. Over 25 trials with KR, the new procedure yielded significantly higher discrimination performance than baseline, an effect not achieved by the Katkin or Whitehead procedures. A second experiment assessed subjects' ability to discriminate S + and S − trials in the new procedure based on a noncardiac input. Subjects could not reliably perform this discrimination.