The Orienting Reflex in Epilepsy

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Abstract
An electrographic study of the somatic, autonomic and EEG components of the orienting reflex elicited by a repetitive auditory stimulus, per- formed in 42 epileptic and 21 normal subjects, revealed the following: (1) The orienting reflex was usually more intense in epileptic than in control subjects. The degree of intensification depended on the interparoxysmal features of the EEG activity; (2) habituation of the three components of the orienting reflex was, as a rule, harder to obtain in epileptics; (3) among the three components of the orienting reflex, it was the autonomic one that showed the most outstanding disturbance in habituation. From the data obtained, it emerges that in epileptics, both with and without manifest psychologic deficiency, there are interparoxysmal disorders of nervous reactivity which can be detected by testing the orienting reflex and its habituation.

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