Volume 24 (1982) Issue 3 Pages 118-123
The present study is an attempt to determine whether the subject's effort to put her own cardiac activity into entrainment with artificial extrinsic feedforward signals, as target response, facilitates learned cardiac control. During the initial six sessions, subjects were trained to press key simultaneously with feedback signals in order to facilitate their interoceptive detection of cardiac activity. During the latter four sessions, which were provided for the period of control training, these same subjects were required to bi-directionally control their cardiac activity, under conditions of entrainment effort to extrinsic feedforward signals as target response for two sessions and under conditions of no such signals for two sessions. Results replicated and extended our previous findings on interoceptive detection and cardiac control, i.e., the two experimental groups showed significantly better cardiac control than the control group, lending support to the notion that entrainment effort may serve as a behavioral strategy for developing self-control on cardiac activity.