Key result
Feedback-based discrimination training significantly improves healthy individuals' ability to detect variations in their blood pressure.
Why the study?
The ability of humans to discriminate variations in their own blood pressure and the effects of discrimination training on this performance were unclear.
Does discrimination training improve the ability to discriminate variations in own blood pressure in healthy male volunteers?
Does discrimination training improve the ability to discriminate variations in own blood pressure in healthy male volunteers?
Healthy individuals can learn to discriminate variations in their own blood pressure with feedback, but this ability is not maintained once feedback is removed.
Feedback training may aid BP awareness in healthy men but lacks durability without it; leaves open clinical utility or broader applications.
This research concerns the ability of humans to discriminate variations in their own blood pressure in comparing two successive 5‐s periods, and the effects of discrimination training (knowledge of results) on their performance. The subjects were 72 healthy male volunteers studied under various conditions. Continuous recordings were made of blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration. Without knowledge of results, discrimination of systolic blood pressure occurred at chance levels, but performance improved significantly over two sessions of discrimination training. This improvement was not maintained in a subsequent session in which no feedback was provided. Discrimination of diastolic blood pressure achieved significant levels when subjects were given knowledge of results. In general, the larger the difference to be discriminated in pressure, the better the performance. The paper also discusses relationships between blood pressure discrimination performance and simultaneous variations in heart rate and respiration, post‐session subjective reports, and the role of cuff pressure changes in performance.
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Greenstadt et al. (1986) studied Healthy (n=72). Discrimination training (knowledge of results) vs. Without knowledge of results was evaluated on Ability to discriminate variations in own blood pressure. Discrimination training with knowledge of results significantly improved the ability of healthy men to discriminate variations in their own systolic and diastolic blood pressure.
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