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The Discriminability of Temporal Patterns Used in the Whitehead Discrimination Procedure
Author(s) -
Jones Gary E.,
Collins Steven W.,
Dabkowski Edward A.,
Jones Kenneth R.
Publication year - 1988
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.1469-8986.1988.tb01890.x
Subject(s) - psychology , stimulus (psychology) , heartbeat , audiology , auditory stimuli , tactile discrimination , tactile stimuli , communication , cognitive psychology , neuroscience , perception , sensory system , somatosensory system , medicine , computer security , computer science
Katkin, Reed, and DeRoo (1983) reported that subjects were unable to make discriminations between two exteroceptively presented tones at delays commonly used in the Whitehead heartbeat detection procedure. To further evaluate this report, 72 men and women were equally divided into five experimental and one control group and presented with two tactile, auditory, visual, or two mixed‐mode exteroceptive stimulus pairs (tactile/visual and tactile/auditory). Also, external stimuli were presented so that SI occurred either concomitantly with each R‐wave (coincident) or delayed 100 ms after each R‐wave (noncoincident). This procedure occurred during the first two phases of the data collection process. Phase 3 consisted of 40 standard Whitehead heartbeat discrimination trials. All five experimental groups were shown to have high levels of performance with the exteroceptive stimuli and high proportions of good discriminators. Analyses within groups showed that performance did not differ significantly across the coincident and noncoincident exteroceptive discrimination conditions, but both of these phases showed significantly higher performance than during the Whitehead task. Therefore, the data clearly show that subjects are able to make the temporal discriminations required in the Whitehead paradigm when stimuli are presented exteroceptively, but that the ability to make exteroceptive temporal discriminations has little to do with the ability to make similar interoceptive discriminations.