Abstract
The interruptive effect of painful experimental stimulation on cognitive processes is a well-known phenomenon. This study investigated the influence of pain duration on the negative effects of pain on cognition. Thirty-four healthy volunteers performed a rapid serial visual presentation task (RSVP) in which subjects had to detect (visual detection task) and count the occurrence of a target letter (working memory task) in two separate sessions while being stimulated on the left volar forearm with either short (2 sec) or long (18 sec) painful heat stimuli of equal subjective intensity. The results show that subjects performed significantly worse in the long pain session as indexed by decreased detection and counting performance. Interestingly, this effect on performance was also observed during control trials of the long pain session in which participants did not receive any painful stimulation. Moreover, subjects expected long painful stimulation to have a greater impact on their performance and individual expectation correlated with working memory performance. These findings suggest that not only the length of painful stimulation but also its expected ability to impair cognitive functioning might influence the interruptive function of pain. The exact relevance of expectation for the detrimental effects of pain on cognitive processes needs to be explored in more detail in future studies.
Highlights
Pain naturally induces avoidance behavior to reduce current harm or prevent the individual from further injury and ensures our survival [1]
This study investigated the influence of pain duration on the interruptive function of pain by applying tonic or phasic painful heat stimuli during a visual detection task
Tonic painful stimulation led to a decrease in detection performance and increased reaction times in both painful trials and non-painful control trials compared to short painful stimulation
Summary
Pain naturally induces avoidance behavior to reduce current harm or prevent the individual from further injury and ensures our survival [1]. To achieve this function, pain inherently attracts and demands attention and tends to interfere with ongoing cognitive processes resulting in detrimental cognitive performance. Pain inherently attracts and demands attention and tends to interfere with ongoing cognitive processes resulting in detrimental cognitive performance This phenomenon is referred to as the “interruptive function of pain” [2] and has been demonstrated for acute, experimental [3] and clinical pain [4] as well as chronic pain states [5,6]. The detrimental effect of pain is substantially modulated by various bottom-up and top-down factors including stimulus intensity [7], stimulus novelty [8,9], stimulus predictability [8], the tendency to catastrophize about pain [10,11] and anxiety or pain-related threat
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