Stimulus Omission and Dishabituation of the Electrodermal Orienting Response: The Allocation of Processing Resources

Siddle, David A.T.; Packer, Jeanette S.

doi:10.1111/j.1469-8986.1987.tb00276.x

Cited by 84 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…In line with this assumption, Siddle and Packer (Packer & Siddle, 1989;Siddle & Packer, 1987) found that RTs to a secondary probe were slower during unexpected trials, indicating that unexpected events indeed demand processing resources. However, these authors did not explicitly address the theoretically important assumption of a linear (or at least monotonic) relationship between the unexpectedness of an event and the amount of processing devoted to it.…”

Section: Interruption Of Ongoing Activitiesmentioning

confidence: 84%

Surprise and schema strength.

Schützwohl

1998

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

132

160

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Four experiments investigated the effects of stimuli discrepant with schemata of varying strength on three surprise components: The interruption of ongoing activities (indexed by response time increase), the focusing of attention on the schema-discrepant stimulus (indexed by memory performance), and the feeling of surprise (indexed by self-reports). Response times were consistently found to increase with schema strength. This effect was attributed to the increasing difficulty of schema revision. In contrast, memory for the schemadiscrepant stimulus was not affected by schema strength, supporting the hypothesis that schema-discrepant stimuli are stored in memory with a distinct tag. Finally, self-reports of surprise intensity varied with schema strength only if they were made immediately after the surprising event without any intervening questions, suggesting that self-reports of surprise are highly susceptible to memory distortions. Surprise and Schema Strength 3The purpose of the experiments described in this article is to contribute to the empirical investigation of the emotion of surprise. More precisely, the aim of the present study was to examine the effects of the strength of the cognitive structure or schema from which the surprise-eliciting event deviates, on three components of the surprise syndrome, namely the subjective feeling of surprise, the interruption of ongoing activities and the focusing of attention on the surprise-eliciting event.Previous research on surprise has been primarily focused on empirical demonstrations of the surprise reaction in response to schema-discrepant events and paid little attention to the characteristics of surprise-eliciting conditions and their effects on the different components of surprise addressed in the present study (e.g., Charlesworth, 1964;Desai, 1939;Meyer Niepel, Rudolph, & Schützwohl, 1991;Niepel, Rudolph, Schützwohl, & Meyer, 1994). For example, Meyer et al. (1991) showed that a schema-discrepant event indeed causes the surprise reaction typically consisting of the subjective feeling of surprise (as indexed by verbal reports), the interruption of ongoing activities (as indexed by action delay), and the focusing of attention on the surprise-eliciting event (as indexed by memory for this event). However, no efforts were made to systematically examine the potential effects of antecedent conditions on these surprise components.The present experiments are directed at this research lacuna. They focus on the effects of one specific antecedent condition, namely the strength of the schema from which the surprise-eliciting event deviates, on the intensity of the subjective feeling of surprise, the duration of the interruption of ongoing activities, and the focusing of attention on the surprise-eliciting event. The following questions were addressed: Does (a) the reported intensity of the feeling of surprise, (b) the duration of action delay, and (c) memory performance for the surprise-eliciting event increase with increases in schema strength? Surprise and Sc...

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Section: Interruption Of Ongoing Activitiesmentioning

confidence: 84%

Surprise and schema strength.

Schützwohl

1998

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

132

160

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“…The specific hypothesis examined by Dawson et al was that the orienting response is associated with the allocation of limited processing resources (e.g., Siddle & Packer, 1987). Dawson et al tested college students on a dual-task procedure.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Latent habituation of the orienting response in the preweanling rat

Richardson

Campbell

1992

Animal Learning & Behavior

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The effect of inhibiting the orienting response on information processing was examined in four experiments. A nonsignal auditory stimulus was presented four times to preweanling rats either 30 sec or 15 min after they had been placed in an unfamiliar environment (Experiments lA and 2), shocked (Experiment IB), or experienced a shift in environmental context (Experiment lC). Both an autonomic (heart rate) and a behavioral component of the orienting response to the novel stimulus were recorded. In the 15-min condition, the auditory stimulus elicited a consistent orienting response on the first trial that habituated rapidly with successive trials. In contrast, the auditory stimulus did not elicit a detectable orienting response in the 30-sec condition on any of the four trials. However, when the auditory stimulus was re-presented after a brief retention interval, a comparable level of habituation was seen in both groups. These results demonstrate that animals in the 30-sec condition detected, attended to, and encoded the auditory stimulus even though they did not orient, either autonomically or behaviorally, to that stimulus when it was first presented. This process of response-independent habituation is best described as latent habituation. Like latent learning, latent habituation took place in the absence of any observable change in behavior. The implications of this effect for current theories of habituation and of the orienting response are discussed.Habituation of unconditioned reactions to sensory stimuli has been a powerful tool for studying nonassociative learning in animals ranging from Aplysia to humans (e.g., Bornstein, 1985;Carew, 1984). The relatively simple procedures used to study habituation have made this technique especially popular in animal and developmental research. Habituation of the gill-withdrawal response in Aplysia, for example, has dominated work on the cellular bases of learning and memory, whereas habituation of visual fixations on a novel stimulus pattern has been the most frequently used technique to assess learning and memory in the human infant. For the last several years, we have been using habituation of the orienting response to novel sensory stimuli to assess nonassociative learning and memory in the developing rat (e.g., Richardson, Hayne, & Campbell, 1992a).The orienting response is an unconditioned reaction to novel stimuli of low to moderate intensity that consists of a variety of central, autonomic, and behavioral responses (e.g., Turpin, 1983). The specific autonomic response recorded in our research is heart rate, which decreases in response to novel olfactory, visual, and auditory stimuli (e.g.,

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“…The data were range corrected by dividing each participant’s SCR by her maximum response (Lykken and Venables, 1971), in this experiment the highest US response (largest deflection 900–4000 after US onset). A square root transformation was applied to normalize the distribution (Siddle and Packer, 1987). The corrected SCRs were averaged across two trials resulting in five acquisition and five extinction blocks per stimulus.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Influence of State Anxiety on Fear Discrimination and Extinction in Females

Dibbets

Evers

2017

Front. Psychol.

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Formal theories have linked pathological anxiety to a failure in fear response inhibition. Previously, we showed that aberrant response inhibition is not restricted to anxiety patients, but can also be observed in anxiety-prone adults. However, less is known about the influence of currently experienced levels of anxiety on inhibitory learning. The topic is highly important as state anxiety has a debilitating effect on cognition, emotion, and physiology and is linked to several anxiety disorders. In the present study, healthy female volunteers performed a fear conditioning task, after being informed that they will have to perform the Trier Social Stress Test task (n = 25; experimental group) or a control task (n = 25; control group) upon completion of the conditioning task. The results showed that higher levels of state anxiety corresponded with a reduced discrimination between a stimulus (CS+) typically followed by an aversive event and a stimulus (CS-) that is never followed by an aversive event both during the acquisition and the extinction phase. No effect of state anxiety on the skin conductance response associated with CS+ and CS- was found. Additionally, higher levels of state anxiety coincided with more negative valence ratings of the CSs. The results suggest that increased stress-induced state anxiety might lead to stimulus generalization during fear acquisition, thereby impairing associative learning.

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Stimulus Omission and Dishabituation of the Electrodermal Orienting Response: The Allocation of Processing Resources

Cited by 84 publications

References 15 publications

Surprise and schema strength.

Surprise and schema strength.

Latent habituation of the orienting response in the preweanling rat

The Influence of State Anxiety on Fear Discrimination and Extinction in Females

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