Hierarchies of stimulus discrimination and response magnitude among autonomic measures provide independent characterization of individual autonomic function.
May support individualized autonomic profiling in research; leaves open clinical relevance without validation.
On three occasions, 5 physiological measures were recorded from 16 male subjects during repeated presentations of two tones, one followed and one not followed by electric shock. For the group, it was found that the measures differed significantly in the degree of discrimination between the tones. For the individuals, there were found to exist both consistent hierarchies of degree of stimulus discrimination among the measures, and consistent hierarchies of response magnitude, the latter most markedly present after elimination of prestimulus differences among subjects utilizing the individuals' regressions. The two hierarchies were observed not to be significantly related, and it is suggested that they furnish useful independent characterization of the autonomic function of the individual.
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James D. Block (1965) studied this question.
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