The Acquisition of Autonomic Control Through Biofeedback: The Case Against an Afferent Process and a Two-Process Alternative.

Brener has proposed a general theory of the development of voluntary control which offers as its focus an account of the process underlying the acquisition of control over autonomic responses. This account views the acquisition process as consequent to the development of the subject's ability to discriminate afferentation related to the response state to be produced and to his formulating an appropriate response image on the basis of this afferentation. The paper begins with an extensive review of biofeedback studies pertinent to the theory. This review yields little convincing evidence for Brener's views. Selected studies on the performance and the acquisition of motor skills and on the nature of the image are then examined. These suggest that the development of control of a response may rely primarily on efferent processes, with afferent processes playing, at most, a secondary role. A two-process theory of the acquisition of autonomic control is then presented. The theory proposes that, in most instances, biofeedback training leads to autonomic control through a process consisting primarily in the identification of efferent behavioural programmes already within the subject's repertoire. The theory further proposes that an afferent acquisition process such as postulated by Brener may also underlie the development of autonomic control, but only under conditions where behavioural programmes effective in controlling the target response are either unavailable or inaccessible to the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]