Perceptual amplification following sustained attention: implications for hypervigilance
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Perceptual amplification following sustained attention: implications for hypervigilance Mark Hollins1 · Luke Athans1 Received: 17 March 2020 / Accepted: 20 August 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract It is known that attending to a cutaneous stimulus briefly increases its subjective intensity. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether an extended period of attention would produce a longer-lasting perceptual amplification. Eighty subjects were assigned alternately to experimental and control groups. Members of the two groups received identical series of tactile stimuli (near-threshold von Frey filaments applied to the forearm), but those in the experimental group carried out a two-interval forced-choice detection task that required attention to the filaments, while subjects in the control group attended instead to a video game. After this initial phase, all subjects gave magnitude estimates of the intensity of a wide range of von Frey filaments. The experimental group gave estimates 42% greater than those of the control group, both for filaments used in the initial phase, and others not presented previously; the perceptual amplification did not, however, transfer to a different type of pressure stimulus, a 5 mm-diameter rod applied to the skin. The aftereffect of sustained attention lasted for at least 15 min. This phenomenon, demonstrated in normal subjects, may have implications for the hypervigilance of some chronic pain patients, which is characterized by both heightened attention to pain and long-lasting perceptual amplification of noxious stimuli. Keywords Aftereffect · Attention · Hypervigilance · Magnitude estimation · Perceptual amplification · Tactile stimulation
Introduction William James (1908, pp. 425–426) noted that “Most people would say that a sensation attended to becomes stronger than it otherwise would be.” But he cautiously added, “This point is, however, not quite plain, and has occasioned some discussion…The subject is one which would well repay exact experiment, if methods could be devised.” James’s call for “exact experiment” has been answered in recent decades, by psychologists and neuroscientists who experimentally manipulate the attention paid to stimuli, and then measure the resulting sensory experiences. For example, this approach has been used in research on the visual system, to show that attention alters stimulus appearance Communicated by Melvyn A. Goodale. * Mark Hollins [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA
by increasing perceived contrast (Carrasco et al. 2004) and in other ways (see reviews by Carrasco 2011; Carrasco and Barbot 2019). In the somesthetic modality, it has been shown that the perception of painful stimuli can be transiently modified by short-term experimental manipulations of attention (Miron et al. 1989; Villemure et al. 2003). Discrimination and detection of innocuous cutaneous stimu
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