Abstract
A recent model of hypnosis proposed that this phenomenon could be induced by suppression of a frontal supervisory attentional system. Thus, subjects under hypnosis were conceived as having passed executive control to the hypnotist. Kaiser et al., 1997[1]have recently described the effects of hypnosis on subjects performing a Stroop-type task in which the subject had to press a left or a right mouse button according to the colour and direction of an arrow on a VDU screen. If the arrow was green, the subject had to press the right-hand button when the arrow was pointing to the right, and the left button when the arrow was pointing to the left. If the arrow was red, the previous stimulus–response mapping was reversed and the subject had to respond with the right button to an arrow pointing left and vice versa. As expected, subjects under hypnosis made more errors on the incongruent trials. Simultaneous recordings of event-related potentials indicated that these erroneous responses were accompanied by a normal early negativity waveform (100ms after an error) and a reduced late positivity waveform (300ms after an error) during hypnosis. These results are interpreted as a failure of context updating rather than a global loss of supervisory attention, and provide an interesting window into hypnotic states.
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