The purpose of this paper is two‐fold. The first is to introduce a method of analyzing single trials of beat‐to‐beat heart rate in adult subjects, by which significant changes in heart rate following a stimulus may be detected. The second is to demonstrate the economy of this form of analysis by presenting it in the context of a small‐scale experiment. The experiment examined heart rate orienting responses to a standard auditory signal, comparing the effects of high and low continuous background noise. The higher background noise level was found to enhance the accelerative component of the heart rate response to auditory signals.
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