Principles of cognitive reverberation

Abstract

A series of experiments was carried out as part of a continuing program of research based on a conceptual model of the mind. The specific function under empirical scrutiny was a cognitive feedback loop presumed to sustain network activity autonomously for a period of time until the loop gradually dies down. This reverberatory process was explored intensively in a female subject by means of a salience technique consisting of the oral presentation of a string of six consonants, to which she merely listened, and her subsequent report of whatever consonants spontaneously “popped into mind.” The interval between stimulus presentation and her report contained various filler activities, such as counting beats of a metronome or looking at colored travel slides, and varied in duration. The key experimental intervention was a brief excursion into deep hypnosis at some point during the interval, which served to disrupt cognitive processing and permitted inferences to be drawn concerning reverberation. The following principles were derived from the data:. 1. Reverberation consists of autonomous reactivation of a network by the signal transmitted from that network at the time of its original activation. 2. Reverberation takes place independently of conscious awareness. 3. The reverberating signal is strongest at the time of network activation and gradually decreases until it dissipates. 4. Barring disruption, a single series of reverberations from a transient network apparently can last for hours. 5. Reverberation acts to retard, in proportion to its own intensity, the intrinsic rate of decay in network strength. 6. The course of reverberation is a direct function of current amplification level in the system. 7. For a given level of amplification, strength of the reverberating signal is an inverse function of the strength of competing signals in process.

Effects of interference and cognitive arousal upon the processing of organized thought.

“…The arousal cues could have affected this process differentially. Of the two, we prefer the decay-retarding hypothesis as more parsimonious (see Blum, Geiwitz, & Hauenstein, 1967). The present findings are consistent with those of the hexagram experiments mentioned in the introduction.…”

“…A variety of studies with other 5s had affirmed the validity of these cognitive arousal manipulations, which consistently yielded monotonic relationships to number of errors in a visual tracking task (Ehrlkh, 1964), degrees of boredom (Geiwitz, 1966), and response latency in a discrimination task employing a scale of tachistoscopically flashed Xs (Blum, Geiwitz, & Stewart, 1967). The same ordered effect was noted when the arousal cues were in force during registration of both focal and incidental stimuli as well as during the reverberation period in the salience task (Blum, Geiwitz, & Hauenstein, 1967). For the two Ss in the present investigation the cues had already been employed successfully hi the follow-up studies of cognitive reverberation (Blum et al, 1968).…”

“…The distinction between cognitive and organismic arousal, to which we have referred, had produced a posthypnotic programming technique geared specifically to the former. Two series of studies (Blum, Geiwitz, & Hauenstein, 1967;Blum, Hauenstein, & Graef, 1968) had established the existence of a period of autonomous reverberation subsequent to input registration and had implicated level of mental arousal and interference as crucial factors in determining the course of such reverberation. Moreover, an adaptation of our salience technique which had been employed in those studies seemed especially promising.…”

Selective inattention to anxiety-linked stimuli.

“…Another outcome of consciousness is a return transmission to the content networks via a cognitive feedback loop, which can serve as source of cognitive reverberation (see Blum, Geiwitz, & Hauenstein, 1967;Blum, Graef, & Hauenstein, 1968a;, for a series of experiments bearing on this topic). A snowball effect, that is, a monopolization of consciousness by an ever-increasing strong signal, is normally forestalled by a combination of factors: Signals broadcasting from cognitive networks automatically decay over time, and transmission along the feedback loop is typically intermittent as a function of the serial operation of the channel selector.…”

EEG correlates of posthypnotically controlled degrees of cognitive arousal

“…Geiwitz, & Stewart, 1967), response time for the identification of tachistoscopically flashed Xs varying in darkness of line, performance on the Stroop color-word test (Blum & Graef, 1971), and the capacity for selective concentration on color vs. form of consonants (Blum & Porter, 1973). A series of experiments on cognitive "reverberation" (Blum, Geiwitz, & Hauenstein, 1967;Blum, Hauenstein, & Graef, 1968) utilized the insertion of 5-sec periods of varying degrees of cognitive arousal in the 20-sec counting interval between oral stimulus presentation of strings of six consonants and the subsequent report by the subject of the flrst six consonants that spontaneously come to mind. The salience of stimulus consonants in the report segment systematically varied from lowest for the -AA interpolation to highest for the +AA interpolation.…”