Bath Centre for Pain Research, University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology, University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom.
Pain. 2017 Oct;158(10):2035-2041. doi: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000001011.
Pain is known to interrupt attentional performance. Such interference effects seem to occur preferentially for tasks that are complex and/or difficult. However, few studies have directly manipulated memory load in the context of pain interference to test this view. Therefore, this study examines the effect of experimental manipulations of both memory load and pain on 3 tasks previously found to be sensitive to pain interference. Three experiments were conducted. A different task was examined in each experiment, each comprising of a high- and low-cognitive load versions of the task. Experiment 1 comprised an attention span (n-back) task, experiment 2 an attention switching task, and experiment 3 a divided attention task. Each task was conducted under painful and nonpainful conditions. Within the pain condition, an experimental thermal pain induction protocol was administered at the same time participants completed the task. The load manipulations were successful in all experiments. Pain-related interference occurred under the high-load condition but only for the attention span task. No effect of pain was found on either the attentional switching or divided attention task. These results suggest that while cognitive load may influence the interruptive effect of pain on attention, this effect may be selective. Because pain affected the high-load version of the n-back task but did not interrupt performance on attentional switching or dual-task paradigms, this means that our findings did not completely support our hypotheses. Future research should explore further the parameters and conditions under which pain-related interference occurs.
疼痛已知会干扰注意力表现。这种干扰效应似乎优先发生在复杂和/或困难的任务中。然而，很少有研究直接在疼痛干扰的背景下操纵记忆负荷来检验这一观点。因此，本研究检验了实验性操纵记忆负荷和疼痛对先前发现对疼痛干扰敏感的 3 项任务的影响。进行了三项实验。每项实验都检查了不同的任务，每个任务都包含任务的高和低认知负荷版本。实验 1 包括注意力跨度（n-back）任务，实验 2 包括注意力转换任务，实验 3 包括分散注意力任务。每个任务都是在疼痛和非疼痛条件下进行的。在疼痛条件下，参与者在完成任务的同时接受了实验性热痛诱导方案。在所有实验中，负荷操纵都是成功的。在高负荷条件下会出现与疼痛相关的干扰，但仅在注意力跨度任务中出现。在注意力转换或双重任务范式中，疼痛没有影响。这些结果表明，虽然认知负荷可能会影响疼痛对注意力的中断效应，但这种效应可能是选择性的。因为疼痛影响了 n-back 任务的高负荷版本，但没有中断注意力转换或双重任务范式的表现，这意味着我们的发现并没有完全支持我们的假设。未来的研究应该进一步探讨疼痛相关干扰发生的参数和条件。
