Highlights
- •Threat of pain automatically biases attention to the pain-related location.
- •Movements accompanying pain steer attention toward somatosensory input.
- •Enhanced N120 somatosensory evoked potential may reflect attentional bias to pain.
- •Location-unspecific P200 somatosensory evoked potential as a reflection of arousal.
Abstract
Attending to pain-relevant information is crucial to protect us from physical harm.
Behavioral studies have already suggested that during anticipation of pain somatosensory
input at the body location under threat is prioritized. However, research using daily
life cues for pain, especially movements, is lacking. Furthermore, to our knowledge,
no studies have investigated cortical processing associated with somatosensory processing
during threatened movements. The current study aims to investigate whether movements
accompanying pain automatically steer attention toward somatosensory input at the
threatened location, affecting somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs). Healthy volunteers
were cued to perform movements with the left or the right hand, and one of these movements
could be accompanied by pain on the moving hand. During movement anticipation, a task-irrelevant
tactile stimulus was presented to the threatened or pain-free hand to evoke SEPs.
During anticipation of movements accompanying pain, the N120 component was increased
for tactile stimuli at the threatened relative to the hand without pain. Moreover,
the P200 SEP was enhanced during anticipation of movements accompanying pain relative
to movements without pain, irrespective of which hand was stimulated. These findings
show that the anticipation of pain-accompanying movements may affect the processing
of somatosensory input, and that this is likely to be driven by attentional processes.
Perspective
This study shows that the anticipation of pain-related movements automatically biases
attention toward stimuli at a pain-related location, measured according to SEPs. The
present study provides important new insights in the interplay between pain and attention,
and its consequences at the cortical level.
Key words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: November 14, 2017
Accepted:
October 27,
2017
Received in revised form:
October 5,
2017
Received:
June 9,
2017
Footnotes
This study was funded by an interdisciplinary BOF 14/IOP/067 grant from Ghent University awarded to S.V.D. and L.D. D.M.T. was supported by the Asthenes long-term structural funding Methusalem grant by the Flemish-Government, Belgium and by the Fund for Scientific Research of the French speaking community of Belgium.
The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.
Identification
Copyright
© 2017 by the American Pain Society
