Some limits on the cognitive control of conditioned autonomic behavior.

Abstract

ABSTRACTBecause certain recently adopted doctrinaire cognitivist positions are just as undesirable as the doctrinaire behaviorist positions of the fifties, evidence is presented to indicate that there are some instances where cognitive factors do not appear to control autonomic conditioning. The first aspect of that evidence deals with tests of the applicability of the contingency position to Pavlovian autonomic conditioning, and the data indicate that conditioned autonomic responses like the GSR do not act like “contingency analysers” over CS‐US intervals ranging from .75 to 8.0 sec. Moreover, measures of cognitive subjective contingency (SC), which could not be taken in the animal studies used previously to support the contingency analysis of Pavlovian conditioning, indicate that the human Ss are aware of the contingency differences considered important for autonomic conditioning by the contingency position. This lack of correspondence between the autonomic and cognitive dependent variables is also relevant to another form of the cognitive‐control position, that knowledge of CS‐US contingencies is related to autonomic conditioning. Such relations were not, in fact, observed between the extents of autonomic and cognitive (SC) discrimination. Finally, a more sensitive and continuous measure of SC is proposed which should yield more precise answers to the empirical and complex question of the limits of cognitive control of conditioned autonomic behavior.