Effects of Changes in Verbal Stimuli on the Skin Conductance Response Component of the Orienting Response

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper presents three experiments which were designed to investigate the effects of changes in verbal stimulus meaning on magnitude of the skin conductance response (SCR) component of the orienting response (OR). In Experiments 1 and 2, subjects received 12 visual presentations of a single word stimulus followed by a test trial involving change. The results of Experiment 1 (N = 48) indicated that a test stimulus which constituted change in meaning and taxonomic category induced larger responses than did a change in meaning alone, which in turn induced larger responses than did a control condition of no change. Experiment 2 (N = 64) investigated the effects of both semantic and acoustic changes and the results indicated that only semantic changes resulted in test trial SCRs which were larger than those in the control condition. Experiment 3 (N = 48) investigated the effects on SCR magnitude of within‐ and between‐taxonomic category shifts following habituation training with 4 examples of the category. In this case, only the between‐category change resulted in SCRs which were larger than those in the control condition of no change. The results of all three experiments were interpreted as support for Sokolov's (1963) claim that the meaning of verbal stimuli is encoded during habituation. Moreover, the results of Experiment 1 indicate that responsiveness on a change trial is a positive function of the amount of change, while the results of Experiment 3 suggest that when a number of examples of a word class are employed during habituation, the semantic characteristics of that class are encoded.