Awareness of the response after feedback training for changes in heart rate and sudomotor laterality.

Abstract

What is the relation between the ability to control visceral responding on a biofeedback task and the ability to report behaviors actually contributing to this performance? Subjects received biofeedback training for unidentified visceral responses and then gave written reports about what they had done to control the feedback displays. Independent judges were given these reports and, on the basis of knowledge about activities known to contribute to visceral activity, were asked to determine the visceral responses for which the subjects had been trained. The reports of subjects who succeeded at bidirectional control of heart rate (Experiment 1) or sudomotor laterality (Experiment 2) showed awareness of behaviors related to feedback as assessed by this procedure, whereas the reports of subjects who failed at bidirectional control did not. Subsequent experiments indicated that these results did not depend on a learning strategy that might have been specific to the initial studies. These findings call into question the view that people are unaware of what they have done to produce the response after training on biofeedback tasks. Earlier studies reporting lack of awareness in biofeedback are discussed in light of factors that affect the measurement of biofeedback learning and response awareness.

Consciousness and Self-Regulation

“…At some point the verbal (consciousness) system, which monitors the other information-processing systems, should seek to code the new behavior program in terms of its own referents. This is exactly what Roberts et al (1984) have recently reported. Their subjects were trained either to control heart rate or to produce lateralized changes in skin conductance, but possible clues as to the nature of the task were specifically concealed.…”

“…First, there has been mounting criticism of the various methods used to measure subjects' ability to discriminate autonomic and other internal responses. These have been voiced particularly strongly by Roberts on theoretical grounds (Roberts, 1977;Roberts, Williams, Marlin, Farrell, & Imiolo, 1984) and by Katkin, (Katkin, Morell, Goldband, Bernstein, & Wise, 1982) and Ross and Brener (1981) on empirical grounds. The thrust of those criticisms is on the one hand that inability to perform on a discrimination task often simply reflects inadequacies in the task.…”

“…Thus, the emphasis that I will place on what are called here feedforward processes parallels a similar emphasis in .the recent work of Brener (1982), Qualls and Sheehan (1981) and Stilson, Matus, and Ball (1980). Moreover, the relatively large importance given to the task instructions owes much to Roberts's conceptual analysis of the environment in which biofeedback training takes place (Roberts & Marlin, 1979;Roberts et al, 1984), although my emphasis here is on how the task demands are represented in the subject's verbal system and on the verbally mediated associations thus generated.…”

Area-specific self-regulation of slow cortical potentials on the sagittal midline and its effects on behavior

“…We also assessed the basis of SP regulation by analyzing verbal reports that subjects gave of their SP control strategies. To ensure the validity of the verbal report data, we used a feedback procedure that allowed self-report to arise only from the subject's memory of behavioral events related to feedback, and not from other sources of self-report that may operate in a feedback situation (e.g., response bias induced by task instructions or spatial orientation of the feedback display; see Roberts et al 1984). We were particularly interested in a contrast of frontal and parietal areaspecific SP self-regulation.…”

Can Humans Perceive Their Brain States?

“…In line with this important differ-ence between peripheral and central physiological processes, subjects who learned to control their autonomic responses were able to report much more consistent strategies they used for self-control (Roberts et al, 1984) than subjects who learned to control their electroencephalogram (EEG) (Roberts et al, 1989). However, the method of direct verbal description of one's conscious strategies may be too coarse to grasp possibly fluent perception of brain activity.…”