Engaging Visual Stimuli and Reflex Blink Modification

ABSTRACT Twenty‐one college undergraduate subjects were provided discrete trials of visual foreground stimuli with varying interest value while an intense acoustic probe delivered during viewing was used to elicit the startle reflex. The foreground stimuli were 35 mm color slides containing photographs of nude male and female models (high interest) or a common household object (low interest). The results of this experiment, using adult subjects, replicate closely the findings of Anthony and Graham (1983) who studied four‐month old human infants in a similar paradigm. That is, when probe stimuli occurred on an auditory channel, reflex magnitude and onset latency were significantly inhibited while subjects were concurrently processing an attention‐engaging visual stimulus. The successful use of EOG techniques to record the eyeblink component of the startle reflex and capture its sensitivity to the attentional manipulation suggests that the probe startle paradigm may be readily put to use in a wide variety of psychophysiological laboratories.