Abstract
The distinctive experience of pain, beyond mere processing of nociceptive inputs, is much debated in psychology and neuroscience. One aspect of perceptual experience is captured by metacognition—the ability to monitor and evaluate one’s own mental processes. We investigated confidence in judgements about nociceptive pain (i.e. pain that arises from the activation of nociceptors by a noxious stimulus) to determine whether metacognitive processes contribute to the distinctiveness of the pain experience. Our participants made intensity judgements about noxious heat, innocuous warmth, and visual contrast (first-order, perceptual decisions) and rated their confidence in those judgements (second-order, metacognitive decisions). First-order task performance between modalities was balanced using adaptive staircase procedures. For each modality, we quantified metacognitive efficiency (meta-d’/d’)—the degree to which participants’ confidence reports were informed by the same evidence that contributed to their perceptual judgements—and metacognitive bias (mean confidence)—the participant’s tendency to report higher or lower confidence overall. We found no overall differences in metacognitive efficiency or mean confidence between modalities. Mean confidence ratings were highly correlated between all three tasks, reflecting stable inter-individual variability in metacognitive bias. However, metacognitive efficiency for pain varied independently of metacognitive efficiency for warmth and visual perception. That is, those participants who had higher metacognitive efficiency in the visual task also tended to have higher metacognitive efficiency in the warmth task, but not necessarily in the pain task. We thus suggest that some distinctive and idiosyncratic aspects of the pain experience may stem from additional variability at a metacognitive level. We further speculate that this additional variability may arise from the affective or arousal aspects of pain.
Highlights
Subjectivity is considered a fundamental aspect of the pain experience (e.g. Beecher, 1957, 1965; Coghill, McHaffie, & Yen, 2003; Guerit, 2012; Hyyppä, 1987; Koyama, McHaffie, Laurienti, & Coghill, 2005; Raij, Numminen, Narvanen, Hiltunen, & Hari, 2005)
We investigated how metacognitive access to nociception compares to thermoception, a sensory modality that serves a regulatory role for the body, and to vision, a sensory modality with fine discriminative capacities that is widely studied in metacognition research
Follow-up Bayesian paired samples ttests showed that participants made fewer correct responses in the innocuous warmth discrimination task (M = 68.9%, 95% credible interval (CI) = [67.6%, 70.1%]) than in the visual contrast discrimination task (M = 71.7%, 95% CI = [71.3%, 72.2%]), BF10 = 328, and the nociceptive pain discrimination task (M = 72.2%, 95% CI = [71.7%, 72.7%]), BF10 = 5.09 × 104
Summary
Subjectivity is considered a fundamental aspect of the pain experience (e.g. Beecher, 1957, 1965; Coghill, McHaffie, & Yen, 2003; Guerit, 2012; Hyyppä, 1987; Koyama, McHaffie, Laurienti, & Coghill, 2005; Raij, Numminen, Narvanen, Hiltunen, & Hari, 2005). One facet of subjective experience is metacognition—the ability to monitor and evaluate one’s own mental processes (Metcalfe & Shimamura, 1994). People with high metacognitive sensitivity are more confident when they have made a correct judgement (i.e. when their perceptual decision accurately reflects the physical properties of a sensory stimulus) than when they have made an incorrect judgement. Of metacognitive sensitivity, a person might show a metacognitive bias, that is, a tendency to be over- or under-confident regardless of whether the judgement was correct. These measures jointly characterise how people evaluate their perceptual decisions. Applied to judgements about nociceptive pain—i.e. pain that arises from the activation of nociceptors by a noxious stimulus (IASP Task Force on Taxonomy, 2011)—metacognitive measures may shed light on some distinctive features of pain perception, such as its vividness and its variability, even when the physical properties of the evoking stimulus are held constant (Coghill et al, 2003; Nickel et al, 2017; Schulz et al, 2015; Woo et al, 2017)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
