Hypnotic susceptibility and performance on various attention-specific cognitive tasks.

We conducted two experiments to investigate cognitive performance as related to level of hypnotic susceptibility. In Experiment 1 time-to-location of a target in a visual search task was assessed. For this task the letter Z was embedded either within straight-form or round-form letters. Results indicated that high-hypnotic-susceptibility subjects (highs) were significantly faster than low-susceptibility-subjects (lows) in locating the embedded letter. Experiment 2 investigated performance on single- and double-digit arithmetic (addition) problems as a function of hypnotic susceptibility level. Subjects were presented with arithmetic problems and were asked to complete them within a 60-s time period. Highs completed a significantly greater number of double-digit problems but not single-digit problems within this time frame than did lows. The results of the two experiments are explained in terms of the application of differing strategies or operations by highs and lows in the performance of cognitive tasks.