National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, National Institutes of Health, 10 Center Drive, Bethesda, MD, 20892, USA.
Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, 171 77, Solna, Sweden.
Sci Rep. 2020 Dec 7;10(1):21373. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-77864-8.
Self-report is the gold standard for measuring pain. However, decisions about pain can vary substantially within and between individuals. We measured whether self-reported pain is accompanied by metacognition and variations in confidence, similar to perceptual decision-making in other modalities. Eighty healthy volunteers underwent acute thermal pain and provided pain ratings followed by confidence judgments on continuous visual analogue scales. We investigated whether eye fixations and reaction time during pain rating might serve as implicit markers of confidence. Confidence varied across trials and increased confidence was associated with faster pain rating reaction times. The association between confidence and fixations varied across individuals as a function of the reliability of individuals' association between temperature and pain. Taken together, this work indicates that individuals can provide metacognitive judgments of pain and extends research on confidence in perceptual decision-making to pain.
自我报告是衡量疼痛的金标准。然而，个体内部和个体之间对疼痛的决策可能存在很大差异。我们测量自我报告的疼痛是否伴随着元认知和信心的变化，类似于其他模态的感知决策。80 名健康志愿者经历了急性热痛，并在连续视觉模拟量表上提供了疼痛评分，随后对信心进行了判断。我们研究了在疼痛评分过程中眼睛注视和反应时间是否可以作为信心的隐含标记。信心在试验中变化，增加的信心与更快的疼痛评分反应时间相关。信心与注视之间的关联因个体对温度和疼痛之间关联的可靠性而异。总的来说，这项工作表明个体可以对疼痛进行元认知判断，并将对感知决策的信心研究扩展到疼痛。
