The Effect of Food Deprivation on Cardiac Response and Subjective Rating During Visual Attention

Heart rate has been reported to decrease during attention to environmental events, assuming attention being uncomplicated by requirements of cognitive work and energetic motor activity. The explanatory association between cardiac deceleration and external attention is strengthened by the recent finding that the greater the attention-value of a stimulus, the greater the deceleration it produces. But attention to specific environmental events is a function of the perceiver's motivational state as well as of stimulus properties. Hence cardiac decelerations during the viewing of a class of objects should be greater when the subject is motivated to perceive them and less great when he is not so motivated.