Abstract
Although hypervigilance may play an important role in clinical pain syndromes, experimental vigilance toward pain is infrequently studied. We studied experimental vigilance to pain by assessing performance during a Continuous Performance Task (CPT), presented in four blocks, in which subjects respond to moderately painful targets occurring in a train of mildly painful nontargets. We assessed detected targets (hits), non-detected targets (misses), reaction times (RTs), and psychological activation (tense arousal). We hypothesized our CPT would produce vigilance behaviors related to pain, anxiety, and limitation of attentional resources similar to the vigilance behaviors which are observed in other sensory modalities in human factors research. The results showed a vigilance decrement during task performance as misses increased (F3, 86=7.79; p=0.00012; comparisons of block 1 with blocks 2, 3, and 4 were significant, p
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