School of Psychology, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK.
Psychol Res. 2022 Mar;86(2):531-543. doi: 10.1007/s00426-021-01508-3. Epub 2021 Apr 1.
Previous research has consistently reported that pain related stimuli are perceived as lasting longer than non-pain related ones, suggesting that pain lengthens subjective time. However, to date, the investigation has been limited to the immediate effects of pain on time perception. The current study aims to investigate whether pain affects how a duration is recalled after a period of delay. In two experiments, participants were asked to complete four temporal generalisation tasks, where they were required first to remember the duration of a standard tone (learning phase) and then to compare the standard duration to a series of comparison durations (testing phase). Using a 2 × 2 design, the four tasks differed in terms of whether participants were exposed to a painful or non-painful stimulus during the learning phase, and whether the testing phase started immediately or 15 min after the learning phase. Participants were exposed to low pain in Experiment 1 and high pain in Experiment 2. Two possible results were expected: pain could decrease temporal accuracy, because pain disrupts cognitive processes required for accurate timing, or pain could increase temporal accuracy, because pain facilitates memory consolidation. Contrary to expectations, results from both Experiments indicated that participants' temporal performances were similar in the pain and no-pain conditions when testing occurred 15 min after the learning phase. Findings, therefore, suggest that pain neither disrupts nor enhances long-term memory representations of duration.
先前的研究一致表明，与疼痛相关的刺激被感知为持续时间比非疼痛相关的刺激更长，这表明疼痛延长了主观时间。然而，迄今为止，该研究仅限于疼痛对时间感知的即时影响。本研究旨在调查疼痛是否会影响延迟一段时间后对持续时间的回忆。在两项实验中，要求参与者完成四项时间泛化任务，他们首先需要记住标准音的持续时间（学习阶段），然后将标准持续时间与一系列比较持续时间进行比较（测试阶段）。使用 2×2 设计，四项任务在学习阶段参与者是否暴露于疼痛或非疼痛刺激以及测试阶段是立即开始还是在学习阶段结束后 15 分钟开始方面有所不同。参与者在实验 1 中暴露于低强度疼痛，在实验 2 中暴露于高强度疼痛。预期会有两种可能的结果：疼痛可能会降低时间准确性，因为疼痛会干扰准确计时所需的认知过程，或者疼痛可能会提高时间准确性，因为疼痛会促进记忆巩固。与预期相反，两个实验的结果都表明，当测试在学习阶段结束后 15 分钟进行时，参与者在疼痛和无疼痛条件下的时间表现相似。因此，研究结果表明，疼痛既不会破坏也不会增强对持续时间的长期记忆表征。
