Acute pain impairs sustained attention

Abstract

Pain affects the lives of many individuals by creating physical, psychological, and economic burdens. A critical psychological factor negatively affected by pain is one’s ability to sustain attention. In order to better understand the effect of pain on sustained attention we conducted three experiments utilizing the psychomotor vigilance task, thought probes, and pupillometry. In Experiment 1, participants in acute pain exhibited overall poorer task performance. However, this effect was localized to the relative frequency and duration of the participants' slowest responses with their faster responses being equivalent to a no-pain control group. In Experiment 2, we replicated the procedure and included periodic thought probes to overtly measure subjective experiences during the task. Participants in pain reported fewer ‘on-task’ thoughts and more exteroceptive thoughts directed toward the source of their pain. In Experiment 3, we replicated the procedure while simultaneously tracking pupillary dynamics using an eye-tracker. Participants in pain had smaller task-evoked pupillary responses, which is thought to be an indicator of task engagement. Taken together, pain led to poorer performance on the psychomotor vigilance task, an increase in the relative frequency and extremeness of slow responses, increases in off-task thoughts, and reductions in a physiological indicator of task engagement. These data speak to theories of how pain competes with task goals for attention and negatively impacts behavior. The broader implications of this work are the identification of a low-level mechanism by which pain can interfere with normal cognitive functioning.

Emotional affection on a sustained attention task: The importance the aging process and depression

“…At least in theory, we expected some sort of relationship between the rating of pain and the mistakes made in the task. On the one hand, some studies have shown an impairment in the performance of sustained attention tasks in the presence of pain [33][34][35][36][37][38]. This was also to be expected given the nature of the experiment.…”

“…The sample of patients with chronic pain we have accessed (n = 49) is relatively small, restricting both the treatment of the data and the statistical analyses that have been conducted. Other researchers that have already studied sustained attention in relation to chronic pain have used samples of a similar size [37][38][39][103][104][105][106][107]. Nevertheless, our view is that a larger sample would have increased the reliability of the results obtained.…”

“…Despite the importance of this attentional component in the field of chronic pain, there are very few instances of empirical research that have addressed it directly [32]. Nevertheless, sundry studies have indicated that pain can impair the performance of sustained attention tasks [33][34][35][36][37][38]. Several researchers have also provided evidence of the existence of an attentional bias in sustained attention in both humans and animals with chronic pain [39,40].…”

The effect of binaural auditory beat stimulation on sustained attention

“…Specifically, we extracted three parameters from the distribution of each individual's RTs: µ, which represents the point of central tendency of the distribution, σ which represents the degree of variability in the distribution, and τ which represents the length of the tail of the distribution. In prior research with the psychomotor vigilance task, motivational incentives have been demonstrated to specifically affect µ, whereas other experiments, like putting participants in acute pain have shown specific effects on τ (Matthew K Robison et al, 2020a).…”