Neural Bases of Hypnosis

Remembering Jane Dywan

Jean-Roch Laurence
jrlaure@vax2.concordia.ca

Hi Jane
I enjoyed reading your paper. In a recent experiment where highs had to go through different paper and pencil tasks indexing frontal lobe functioning as well as other memory tasks we found that their attentional abilities had double hedge consequences. On the one hand it allowed them to be more performant on a directed focused target detection tasks; on the other, they committed more false positives on a recollection task (similar to your lag condition) as if their prior more recent perceptions of the foils made them unable to differentiate between words from the study list and foils.
If I add to this your results with emotional words and the ones you are presenting here, we can certainly start to see how a client may mislabel an internally generated event with an external one. Other factors (for example, the element of surprise (remember the Rescorla model), emotion and repetition may complete the process.
It does raise the issue of involuntariness of responses and its consequences on subsequent behaviors. Your subjects'responses to the lag items represent an intriguing trick from the part of the brain on conscious awareness. Does open new ways of looking at the issue of false memory that are more interesting (and I think valid) than the old response criteria bias of signal detection fame.

[ This message was edited on Fri Dec 11 by the author ]

Fri Dec 11