Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Zhujiang Hospital, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China.
Physical Therapy, Health Science Center, University of North Texas, Fort Worth, TX, USA.
Neural Plast. 2021 Oct 31;2021:9940889. doi: 10.1155/2021/9940889. eCollection 2021.
Attention bias (AB) is a common cognitive challenge for patients with pain. In this study, we tested at what stage AB to pain occurs in participants with experimental pain (EP) and tested whether cognitive load interferes with it. We recruited 40 healthy adults aged 18-27 years, and randomized them into control and EP groups. We sprayed the participants in the EP group with 10% capsaicin paste to mimic acute pain and those in the control group with water, accessing both groups' behavioral results and event-related potential data. We found that high-load tasks had longer response times and lower accuracies than low-load tasks did and that different neural processing of words occurred between the groups. The EP group exhibited AB to pain at an early stage with both attentional avoidance (N1 latency) and facilitated attention (P2 amplitude) to pain words. The control group coped with semantic differentiation (N1) at first, followed by pain word discrimination (P2). In addition, AB to pain occurred only in low-load tasks. As the cognitive load multiplied, we did not find AB in the EP group. Therefore, our study adds further evidence for AB to pain, suggesting the implementation of cognitive load in future AB therapy.
注意偏向（AB）是疼痛患者常见的认知挑战。在这项研究中，我们测试了实验性疼痛（EP）患者在哪个阶段出现 AB，并测试了认知负荷是否会干扰 AB。我们招募了 40 名年龄在 18-27 岁的健康成年人，并将他们随机分为对照组和 EP 组。我们在 EP 组的参与者身上喷洒 10%辣椒素糊剂以模拟急性疼痛，而在对照组的参与者身上喷洒水，记录两组的行为结果和事件相关电位数据。我们发现，高负荷任务的反应时间比低负荷任务长，准确率也比低负荷任务低，而且两组对单词的神经处理方式不同。EP 组对疼痛表现出早期的 AB，对疼痛词表现出注意回避（N1 潜伏期）和促进注意（P2 振幅）。对照组首先应对语义分化（N1），然后是疼痛词辨别（P2）。此外，AB 仅出现在低负荷任务中。随着认知负荷的增加，我们在 EP 组中没有发现 AB。因此，我们的研究为疼痛的 AB 提供了进一步的证据，表明在未来的 AB 治疗中应实施认知负荷。
