Ninety-six subjects, preselected for high or for low hypnotic susceptibility, reported their level of perceived pain during a 50-s baseline immersion of their hand m ice water. In a second immersion, independent groups of high and low hypnotizables (n = 12) were tested (without hypnosis) under four different conditions: (a) analgesia suggestion alone, (b) verbal-distraction task alone, (c) a combination of suggestion plus distraction, and (d) control. Among high hypnotizables, as compared to the control group, all three experimental treatments were effective in reducing pam The combination of suggestion plus distraction was no more effective than was either of the single treatments alone m reducing pain. Among low hypnotizables, only the distraction treatment was effective. The results were interpreted as supporting an attentional-diversion explanation of the effect of waking analgesia suggestions rather than a special resources hypothesis It appears that both high and low hypnotizables can divert attention toward external stimuli, but only high hypnotizables can successfully divert attention inward to control pam
An information tradeoff is an increased processing or utilization of information from one stirnulus source at the expense of processing or utilization of information from a different source. An experiment was conducted to determine whether information tradeoffs occurred when subjects attended selectively to one of two different structural levels of naturalistic scenes. The subjects' attentional focus was directed to either the global or local structure of a scene (i.e., the scene or an object in the scene, respectively) either before or after presentation of a scene. They then had to use the information obtained from a lOO·msec exposure of the scene to choose between two forced-choice alternatives that described one of the levels. The nature of the alternatives was such that both alternatives adequately characterized one of the structural levels on the basis of physical and semantic relations within the scene. Results showed that the subjects were significantly slower and less accurate when their attentional focus and the forced-choice alternatives were at different levels of stimulus structure than when they were at the same level, providing evidence of an information tradeoff when different types of information from a scene were used. When processing information from a particular structural level, information from the other level either was less available or was not used efficiently. Furthermore, the information tradeoffs were more severe in the precue than in the postcue condition, indicating differences in the efficiency of the selectivity process. The results are interpreted with respect to the role of selective attention in processing complex stimuli such as naturalistic scenes.The notion of selectivity in attention necessarily implies an information loss, in which some aspects of the stimulus environment are selected, processed, and transmitted at the expense of other aspects (Haber & Hershenson, 1980; Kinchla, 1980). This selectivity is an inevitable consequence of the limits of the human information processing system and functions to allow extraction of a coherent, meaningful flow of information from the myriad of environmental signals and stimulation impinging on a perceiver (Broadbent, 1958;Kahneman, 1973). A notable effect of selectivity is an information tradeoff, in which
The influences of information organization and similarity-based interference on memory for changing information were investigated in the present experiment. Participants performed a keeping-track task in which they had to remember the most recent value for each of several continually changing attributes associated with one or several objects. Recall was poor when participants kept track of the same changing attribute compared with when they kept track of different changing attributes. This pattern was observed whether many attributes were mapped to one object or a single attribute was mapped to many objects. Keeping-track performance also deteriorated as the number of information events intervening between presentation and recall increased. The results are discussed in terms of similarity-based interference. Also discussed is the notion that this dynamic task gives rise to the need to distinguish between memory capacity for static information and memory capacity for dynamically changing information.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.