An Investigation of Voluntary Responses in Human Classical Eyelid Conditioning

Voluntary responses (VR) in human classical eyelid conditioning were analyzed in this study.In Exp.I, where conditioning under a neutral instruction was compared with that under a facilitatory instruction, it was suggested that VRs were not caused by any learning factor, and that the neutral-instruction conditioning contained a great number of YRs.In Exp.n, where puff-UeS conditioning was compared with noise-UeS conditioning, it was found that the responses in the puff-UeS conditioning attenuated the aversiveness of the ues, but not the noise-UeS conditioning.Any clear-cut conclusion on VRs in conditioning is not derived from this study, but these results would place some serious lilnitation upon this kind of conditioning.Eyelid responses have been employed as one of the most popular indices in human classical conditioning studies.However, classical eyelid conditioning experiments have numerous methodological problems.Of those problems the most important and basic one is how the conditioned response (CR) is distinguished from the other non-CR responses.The non-CR responses, which are liable to be confused with the CR, are alpha, spontaneous, voluntary responses, and if an intense visual CS is employed, beta responses (Gormezano, 1966).The non-CR responses other than the voluntary response (VR) can be distinguished from the CR in their properties such as latencies and shapes, and even if they are confused with the CR, their influences on conditioning data will be small because their frequencies per se are low.On the other hand, not only cannot the VR be easily distinguished from the CR in its shape, latency, and other properties, but its frequency is very high.So the problem of how the VR can be excluded from conditioning data seems to be the most important methodological one in classical eyelid conditioning.In most cases the VR is voluntarily elicited to attenuate the aversiveness of a corneal air puff, which has been employed as the VCS in almost all eyelid conditioning experiments.Hence if the subject tries to attenuate the aversiveness voluntarily, it will be possible that almost all responses in conditioning data consist ofVRs.The conditioning performance levels of the subjects who give a high incidence of VRs are not related either to level of a Manifest Anxiety score or to intensity of the VCS (Spence, 1953;Spence & Taylor, 1951).Furthermore, performance