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Strategy use does not appear to mediate the relationship between
hypnosis and Stroop-task performance. Rather, changes induced by
hypnosis seem to underlie both diminished suppressing attention
performance and the ability to utilize self-directed instrumental stra-
tegies. Both suppressing attention and self-directed strategy use are
functional components of the SAS. These results are most parsimo-
niously interpreted as hypnosis inducing diminished supervisory
attentional control, especially for high susceptibles.
If SAS control is impaired in hypnosis, then how are we to understand
the phenomenal experience of hypnotized individuals, particularly high
susceptibles? If we return to the actual phenomenological descriptions, it
appears that the object of awareness has ‘‘expanded’’ to fill the entire field
of awareness (to occupy or tie up all available representational resources).
The process of awareness seems to become fixed on the object of experi-
ence to the exclusion of all else. It is this quality of experience that has until
now been understood as imperviousness to distraction or strongly fo-
cused attention by numerous theorists in the field. If this exclusive
preoccupation of awareness is not the outcome of the operation of the
processes of SAS control, then perhaps it actually reflects the observed
breakdown in the operation of these very processes. In some sense,
absorbed awareness must involve a fixated focus on the object of experi-
ence to the exclusion of potentially competing alternatives.
A core function of the SAS is the control of volitionally directed
processes, that is, the flexible self-control of the contents of awareness
(Jack & Shallice, 2001). It follows from the present findings that this
flexibility of self-directed attentional control will be diminished, not
enhanced, during hypnosis. This will be especially so for high suscep-
tibles, as the operation of the SAS becomes impaired. A rigidity or
inflexibility in the focus of attention during hypnosis is to be expected,
then, based on this interpretation of present results.
The rigidity or perseveration of attention offers an alternative ex-
planation to the distinctive experiential phenomena described above.
The inhibition of SAS processes might be expected to result in a
perseveration on, or failure to disengage from, the current focus of
experience or ongoing cognitive activity (Woody & Farvolden, 1998).
This may well result in a ‘‘full commitment of available representa-
tional resources’’ to the object or activity occupying awareness
(Tellegen & Atkinson, 1974, p. 274). On this view, the deeply absorbed
experiences that characterize high susceptibles, both in hypnosis and in
daily life, are not the products of more efficient frontal networks of
attention control. Rather, they result from a perseveration in the object
or theme of current awareness, due to the temporary and partial
inhibition of these very processes of self-directed attentional control.
Recent developments in cognitive neuroscience provide a more de-
tailed framework in which to model such processes.
AN EMPIRICAL TEST OF DISSOCIATED CONTROL
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