The perception and discrimination of arterial pulsations: implications for the behavioral treatment of hypertension

The perception and discrimination of target visceral responses may be important for the development and control of physiological functions such as blood pressure. Despite this, biofeedback blood pressure studies have almost exclusively used auditory or visual feedback. The present experiment employed psychophysical scaling procedures to investigate subject's ability to perceive and discriminate pulsatile sensations associated with change in the intensity of arterial pulsations. The perceived intensity of these pulsations vary as a function of the relationship between arterial pressure and applied cuff pressure. The results indicated that maximum intensity pulsations were perceived when occluding cuff pressure equalled mean arterial pressure and that the perceived intensity of pulsations decreased monotonically as cuff pressure was varied relative to this point in either the systolic or diastolic direction. Furthermore, the function relating cuff pressure oscillation amplitude to applied cuff pressure was the same as that obtained for perceived pulsation amplitude. The finding that subjects could accurately discriminate different intensities of pulsating sensations suggests the possibility of their being employed as an effective discriminative stimulus in a blood pressure biofeedback procedure.