Background & Aims
Previous evidence has shown that pain has a significant effect on a variety of attentional processes, with a particularly strong dampening effect observed in more complex, resource-intensive attentional tasks such as the n-back and dot probe tasks (Moore et al, 2008). Further work has extended this, and examined the timeline of attentional disruption caused by pain (Jones & Walsh, 2021), finding, in particular, that pain disrupts disengagement and re-engagement elements of the attentional blink task. With this in mind, attentional repair is potentially a key method through which the negative effect of pain on cognition can be mitigated. This project aims to examine how techniques in learning research can be applied to facilitate attentional repair during experimental pain induction by modifying stimulus salience and applying elements of learning to the attentional blink paradigm.
Methods
The attentional blink task (Raymond, 1992) was used to measure attention performance. The attentional blink task is a computer task in which participants are asked to identify two visual stimuli presented in a rapid stream of distractor stimuli; T1 (the first target) is a pain-related or neutral word. The second (T2) is a probe, which is defined before the stimulus stream is presented and which participants are asked to detect. During the attentional blink, T2 appeared at one of two locations in the stream following T1; position 2 or 5. The presence of the cue at the end of the RSVP was predicted by T2, or randomly placed in the stream. Alongside the blink, recent pain experience was manipulated using heat pain induction. Before completing the blink task, participants engaged in a learning paradigm which modified the salience of certain pain-related stimuli within the task, with the intention of changing attention allocation behaviours towards those targets.
Results
Preliminary results indicate, firstly, that pain experiences continue to disrupt attention significantly. In particular, the early allocation of attentional resources is disrupted when in pain, such that performance in the blink task is inconsistent with previous evidence suggesting a “lag sparing” effect when T2 is presented in close temporal proximity to T1. However, when prefaced by a targeted learning task in which the salience of pain targets is modified, attention repair occurs such that performance in the task attenuates towards non-pain performance. This effect was observed in both male and female participants, and occurred in both experimental and control conditions.
Conclusions
By engaging associative learning processes, we can enact attentional repair for individuals during experimentally-induced pain. Specifically, it seems that by presaging attention-intensive tasks with a learning paradigm which equalises stimulus salience between pain-related and non pain-related stimuli, we can reduce the attentional disruption commonly associated with pain experiences. Although this remains an isolated, exploratory study, this evidence further elucidates our understanding of how learning processes affect pain experiences. Specifically, models of pain such as the fear avoidance model (Crombez et al, 2012) highlight the role of learned fear responses to pain, with an emphasis on the negative outcomes of learning to the pain experience. Here, we suggest there is an opportunity to harness the power of learning processes to ameliorate pain and inhibit the transition to chronicity.
References
Crombez, G., Eccleston, C., Van Damme, S., Vlaeyen, J. W. S., & Karoly, P. (2012). Fear-avoidance model of chronic pain: The next generation. The Clinical Journal of Pain, 28(6), 475–483. https://doi.org/10.1097/AJP.0b013e3182385392
Raymond, J. E., Shapiro, K. L., & Arnell, K. M. (1992). Temporary suppression of visual processing in an RSVP task: An attentional blink? Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, 18(3), 849–860. https://doi.org/10.1037//0096-1523.18.3.849