Experimental manipulation of orienting reflex during semantic conditioning.

Abstract

An orienting reflex evoked during conditioning is assumed to enhance perception and augment the magnitude of the subsequent conditioned responses (CRs). This hypothesis was tested by semantically conditioning the galvanic skin response (GSR) using two CS-UCS pairs concurrently: CSi-noise, CS2tone. The tone was a signal for a simple reaction time (RT) measure. Two groups of 64 university students were 5s. Twenty conditioning trials were embedded in a list of filler words. The Nonreversal group received the same two CS-UCS pairs for all 20 conditioning trials. An orienting reflex (OR) was evoked in the Reversal group when the critical stimulus contingencies were reversed, so that for the last 10 conditioning trials the particular CS-UCS pair was reversed from what it had been during the first ten trials. All 5s manifested reliable semantic conditioning and generalization, with High-OR 5s giving significantly larger mean CRs than Low-OR 5s. Reversal group 5s showed augmented CRs, better differential conditioning, and slower RTs following the reversal, supporting the initial hypothesis. The results are discussed in terms of the role of the OR and arousal-raising treatments in conditioning. Individual differences in the magnitude of the orienting reflex (OR) have been found to be reliably related to differences in the semantic conditioning of autonomic responses and to a number of other complex behaviors (Brotsky, 1968; Maitzman, 1967, 1968; Maltzman & Mandell, 1968). In these studies, .5s categorized as high