Individual Differences in Afterimage Persistence: Relationships to Hypnotic Susceptibility and Visuospatial Skills

Abstract

To investigate the moderating role of individual differences in hypnotic susceptibility and visuospatial skills on afterimage persistence, we presented a codable (cross) flash of light to 40 men and 46 women who had been dark adapted for 20 min. In an unrelated classroom setting, subjects had previously been given two standardized scales of hypnotic susceptibility (Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Shor & Orne, 1962; Group Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form C, Crawford & Allen, 1982) and the Mental Rotations Test (Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978). The first afterimage interval and the afterimage duration correlated significantly with hypnotic responsiveness, supporting Wallace (1979), but did not show the anticipated relationships with mental rotation visuospatial skills. Individuals in the high hypnotizable group had (a) significantly longer afterimage intervals between its first appearance and first disappearance than did those in medium or low groups, as well as (b) significantly longer afterimages between the first appearance and the final disappearance than did those in low groups, but those in medium groups did not differ significantly from the other groups. Discriminant analysis using the afterimage persistence measures classified correctly 65.2% of high hypnotizables, 37.5% of medium hypnotizables, and 54.8% of low hypnotizables. Hypothesized cognitive skills that assist in the maintenance of afterimages and underlie hypnotic susceptibility include abilities to maintain focused attention and resist distractions over time and to maintain vivid visual images.

Hypnotic Susceptibility: Multidimensional Relationships With Cloninger?s Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire, COMT Polymorphisms, Absorption, and Attentional Characteristics

“…Highs may demonstrate faster reaction times than lows in simple response (Braffman & Kirsch, 2001) and decision making (Crawford & Allen, 1983;Crawford, Kapelis, & Harrison, 1995;Mészáros, Crawford, Szabó , Nagy-Kovács, & Révész, 1989) tasks. Further, they show increased afterimage persistence (Atkinson & Crawford, 1992;Wallace, 1979) and greater ability to detect embedded words among letters (Wallace,HYPNOTIC SUSCEPTIBILITY 51 Allen, & Weber, 1994), which also suggest enhanced attentional abilities. One aspect of attentional abilities is absorption, described by Tellegen and Atkinson (1974, p. 268) as ''a disposition for having episodes of 'total' attention that fully engaged one's representational (i.e., perceptual, enactive, imaginative, and ideational) resources.…”

Brain Dynamics and Hypnosis: Attentional and Disattentional Processes

“…Miller, 1975). Highs report significantly more autokinetic movement in a dark environment (Atkinson & Crawford, 1992;Wallace & Garrett, 1973;Wallace, Garrett, & Anstadt, 1974) and even greater movements during hypnosis (Atkinson, 1991). We propose that these findings are due to highs possessing greater sustained attentional and disattentional abilities.…”

Modulation of the postural effects of cognitive load by hypnotizability

“…It depends on the interaction between the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulus and is associated with peculiar cognitive characteristics including mainly high "absorption" in mental images (Tellegen and Atkinson 1974) and focussed attention abilities (Jamieson and Sheehan 2002;Spiegel 2003;Raz 2005). Furthermore, highly hypnotizable individuals show higher scores in the scales of creativity and vividness of visual imagery, greater ability at random numbers generation, larger auditory cortical evoked potentials (see Gruzelier 2006), higher vividness and lower eVort for tactile guided imagery (Carli et al 2007a(Carli et al , b, 2008, higher speed of visual information processing (Friedman et al 1986), lower signal detection thresholds (Farthing et al 1982), longer afterimage persistence (Atkinson and Crawford 1992) and higher arousal in spatial attention tasks (Castellani et al 2007).…”