Modulation of nociceptive processing by spatial attention: can working memory increase attentional selectiveness?

Details

Supervisors

Legrain, Valéry

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences biomédicales, à finalité approfondie

Abstract

Pain and its treatment are major healthcare issues. Since pain is the result of physiological and cognitive factors, treating it could be done by targeting both of them. Therefore, understanding how cognitive factors (such as attention) modulate pain is needed. It has largely been demonstrated that distracting attention away from painful stimuli can reduce its perception and its physiological responses, and that paying attention to painful stimuli can increase it. Moreover, directing attention to one body side while nociceptive stimulations are occurring on both sides has shown to increase the pain perception of the stimuli delivered on the body part where the attention is driven to. Nevertheless, later experiences using more intense stimuli had difficulties to show a spatial effect suggesting to study the effect of the load, i.e., the amount of attention put in a task, on pain perception when attention is driven to one side of the body. To do so, event-related potentials (ERPs) have been recorded in 27 healthy volunteers in response to nociceptive stimuli delivered on the forearm while attention was driven to one body side using a working memory task with two levels of load engaged. Repeated measures ANOVAs performed on the ERPs amplitudes with the two levels of load and the sides as within subject factors showed no significant difference between the different conditions. The absence of a main effect of the load could be explained by the fact that the load implicated in the task was not important enough to counter the salience of the nociceptive stimuli. The absence of a main effect of the side can be justified by the fact that the task and the nociceptive stimuli were not of the same modality, leading the nociceptive stimuli to act as distractors to the task. Therefore, to evaluate if the working memory can, indeed, increase spatial attention selectiveness, a task should be imagined with the nociceptive stimuli as part of the task and with a working memory task implicating a higher load.