No abstract

The findings on cognitive reverberation reported in a previous issue of this journal were replicated and extended. Two male undergraduates, trained in hypnotic methods, participated as subjects in a series of studies employing the same salience technique, in which S first listens to a string of consonants, next engages in a filler activity, and then tells whatever consonants pop into mind. The data again yielded evidence for the existence of an autonomous reverberation process since disruptive effects occurred with the introduction, during the filler interval, of five‐second pauses under hypnosis or a posthypnotic state of low mental arousal. In addition to being altered in either direction by changes in arousal level, the process was once more shown to be vulnerable to competition by the filler task itself. Duration of reverberatory action was found to vary among individuals from less than one minute up to several hours. The replicated observation of no further reduction in salience from an increase in number or length of disruptive pauses supported the two‐process theory of residual network strength plus reverberation expounded earlier. Finally, the role of cognitive arousal was extended to a more complex task involving the differential manipulation of salience in two sets of stimuli presented on the same trial.

No abstract

An exploratory series of investigations was carried out with a very experienced hypnotic S to determine whether manipulations of his mental context could lead to mastery of a seemingly impossible recall task, i.e., lists of six trigrams all drawn from the pool of letters JKQWXZ. Dramatic successes were eventually achieved when prior hypnotic programming served to fractionate the contexts within which trigrams were perceived and remembered. Transfer of this acquired capacity to insulate items contextually was noted in the waking state.In an earlier study we were impressed by the finding that distinctive mental contexts exert a powerful effect upon subsequent salience of material registered in those contexts. Strings of consonants presented under hypnosis were more likely to "pop into mind" spontaneously later in the hypnotic state than in the waking; conversely stimuli registered in the waking state were more salient afterward in waking than hypnosis (Blum, 1967). Some explorations of the unusual persistence of content acquired in unique hypnotic settings over periods of months and even years further reinforced our desire to test the limits of context manipulation as an aid in surmounting obstacles to short-term recall.Method. We chose as the S for this investigation a veteran of a great deal of research involving hypnosis, a male undergraduate who had also participated in the studies mentioned above. The task which we sought to train this admittedly atypical S to master was a seemingly impossible one. A trial consisted of the exposure of six consonant trigrams, all taken from the same pool of letters-JKQWXZ. These particular trigrams were selected for their qualities of maximal interference and minimal association value. Each trigram was shown in a tachistoscope for I sec followed by a 4-sec interval devoted to its rehearsal. A metronome was beating I per sec throughout the trial to assist in regularizing the rehearsal. Four sec after the sixth trigram's rehearsal, S was asked to recall all the items to the best of his ability and to indicate when he was resorting to guesswork in order to produce six responses. He was free to take as much time as he wanted, and there were no requirements for recalling the trigrams in any particular sequence. Approximately 20 sec elapsed between the end of S's recall and presentation of the first trigram on the subsequent trial. We began with 12 different lists which were presented in random order throughout blocks of six trials separated by rest periods. No more than four blocks were included in any given 2-h session. Two sample lists follow: WQX QJK ZWJ XKZ KQW ZXQ; KJQ JKZ WKX·QZW ZJK WQJ.For scoring purposes the decision was made to give half~redit (I point) for a report containing all three letters of a stimulus trigram but not in their original order, or two of the three letters both in correct position. Correctly recalled items are given two points, so that a perfect score on a trial is 12. Guesses are scored the same way and included in the total.The task of achieving per...

The studies reported here are part of a series dealing with cognitive arousal and reverberation. Prior investigations highlighted the influence of brief posthypnotic manipulations of mental arousal, introduced during the reverberation phase following stimulus presentation of strings of consonants, upon the later salience of those stimuli. In the present experiments, S's task consisted 1st of reading aloud 6 words in scrambled order from 2 familiar 3-word phrases and then reporting whatever words "popped into mind" during a 12-sec. period. Posthypnotic experimental interventions consisted of (o) the auditory hallucination of numbers while reporting words, and (b) the alterations of cognitive arousal in S degrees ranging from very high to very low. Both variables produced significant effects upon the meaningful organization of words in 2 5s' reports.