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The disruptive effects of pain on n-back task performance in a large general population sample

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-11-19, 14:19 authored by Nina Attridge, Donna Noonan, Christopher Eccleston, Edmund Keogh
Pain captures attention, displaces current concerns, and prioritizes escape and repair. This attentional capture can be measured by its effects on general cognition. Studies on induced pain, naturally occurring acute pain and chronic pain all demonstrate a detrimental effect on specific tasks of attention, especially those that involve working memory. However, studies to date have relied on relatively small samples, and/or one type of pain, thus restricting our ability to generalize to wider populations. We investigated the effect of pain on an n-back task in a large heterogeneous sample of 1318 adults. Participants were recruited from the general population and tested via the internet. Despite the heterogeneity of pain conditions, participant characteristics and testing environments, we found a performance decrement on the n-back task for those with pain, compared to those without: there were significantly more false alarms on non-target trials. Furthermore we also found an effect of pain intensity: performance was poorer in participants with higher intensity compared with lower intensity pain. We suggest that the effects of pain on attention found in the laboratory occur in more naturalistic settings. Pain is common in the general population and such interruption may have important, as yet uninvestigated, consequences for tasks of everyday cognition that involve working memory, such as concentration, reasoning, motor planning, and prospective memory.

Funding

This research was supported by an unrestricted grant for research from Reckitt Benckiser Healthcare UK Ltd.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematical Sciences

Published in

PAIN

Volume

156

Issue

10

Pages

1885 - 1891

Citation

ATTRIDGE, N., 2015. The disruptive effects of pain on n-back task performance in a large general population sample. Pain, 156(10), pp. 1885-1891.

Publisher

© International Association for the Study of Pain

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Pain. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Pain, 156(10), pp. 1885-1891, DOI: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000000245

ISSN

0304-3959

Language

  • en

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