Hypnosis and Cognition

This article summarizes the contributions of hypnosis to our understanding of cognition. These contributions have been especially salient in the study of memory, and include source amnesia and the distinction between episodic and semantic memory; the occurrence of semantic priming in implicit (unconscious) memory; and paramnesia (false memory). Posthypnotic amnesia shows that explicit and implicit memory can be dissociated even under optimal encoding conditions. The hypnotic alterations of perception may expand the scope of central executive control over “low-level” sensory and perceptual processes, and offer a new perspective on perceptual couplings. Implicit (unconscious) perception in hypnosis is not subject to the same analytic limitations encountered in masked priming. In the study of “high-level” thought processes, hypnosis has played an important role in understanding the formation of delusional beliefs, and of intuitions in problem-solving. Studies of hypnosis suggest that automatic processes can be “de-automatized,” as in the reversal of Stroop interference by suggestions for hypnotic agnosia. In social cognition, Orne’s analysis of demand characteristics laid the foundations for the cognitive revolution in social psychology, by underscoring the status of subjects—and people outside the laboratory—as active, sentient, problem-solving agents. The search for correlates of hypnotizability led to the incorporation of openness to experience as a major cognitive dimension in the structure of personality. One topic for future research is the relationship between hypnotizability in children and their development of a theory of mind. Studies of hypnosis in children may shed new light on the development of the imagination.