Autonomic responses to shock-associated words in a nonattended message: a failure to replicate.
Names of cities were shock associated and then embedded in material presented to the nonattended channel in a dichotic listening and shadowing situation. Despite earlier claims of differential responding to city names in the absence of awareness, no such differential responding was found. A test for conditioning following the dichotic listening task found that the subjects had been conditioned. Postexperimental interviews found that the subjects were aware of the city-shock contingency and had expected to be shocked during the dichotic listening task. Comparisons are made with other studies of galvanic skin responses to unattended words.
D001244:Association; D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception; D003216:Conditioning, Operant; D004597:Electroshock; D007839:Functional Laterality; D005712:Galvanic Skin Response; D006801:Humans; D007257:Information Theory; D011603:Psychophysiology