Physiological Effects of Combinations of Painful and Cognitive Stimuli

Abstract

Sympathetic activity (SA) was reduced when a cognitive task was imposed during an ongoing response to cold pressor. However, this reduction effect was not obtained when CP was imposed 40‐sec after the onset of a cognitive task. Rather the response level appeared to be about that which would have been obtained from cold pressor alone. These results suggest that the reduction found in the former situation is not the result of distraction due to cognitive activity per se, as we had previously proposed, but it is the initial SA resulting from presentation of the cognitive task that causes the interaction. This suggests that the competition occurs at a level below that of cognition.

Physiological Responses to Mild Heteromodal Sensory Stimulation

“…With the latter, the amount of masking changes as a function of the time interval between the presentation of the heteromodal stimuli. The suppression of pain by other stimuli seems to be well documented for two different sources of pain (Duneker, 1937), for sound, light, vibration, and heat (Benjamin, 1956), and recently more extensively for sound (e.g., Gardner, Licklider, & Weisz, 1960;Mefferd & Wieland, 1965;Sadler et al, 1969). The evident generality of the failure for contiguous responses to heteromodal stimuli to summate seems to warrant intensive investigation of the phenomenon.…”

“…Previously (Sadler et al, 1969) we observed that the autonomic responses during silent reading were so much smaller than were those to cold pressor, that a failure to summate was evident only when reading was imposed during cold pressor. The purpose of the first experiment was to determine whether the response to a mild sensory stimulus imposed while >S was reading silently would summate with the ongoing reading response.…”