Pavlovian Conditioning of Chevreul's Movement

Abstract

The purpose of the present experiments was to test the hypothesis that Chevreul's Movement (CM) is subject to Pavlovian analysis. CM is defined as movement of a hand-held pendulum in a direction suggested to or expected by a subject when he reports that he did not voluntarily attempt to make it move. CM was successfully conditioned to nonsense syllable and word conditional stimuli. In addition, conditional CM was influenced by number of conditioning trials and displayed stimulus generalization. These results support the hypothesis that Pavlovian factors contribute to CM. Implications for analysis of other instances of “involuntary” behavior associated with suggestibility and hyponosis situations were discussed.