Controlling attention to nociceptive stimuli with working memory.

Legrain, Valéry; Crombez, Geert; Mouraux, André · 2011 · DOAJ

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0020926

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Summary

This study investigates whether working memory can control the involuntary attentional capture caused by nociceptive (painful) stimuli. Because pain signals potential tissue damage, it typically disrupts ongoing cognitive tasks by diverting attention. The authors sought to determine if actively maintaining task-relevant information in working memory could shield cognitive processing from this distraction, and whether this effect was specific to working memory mechanisms rather than general increases in task demand. The researchers conducted an experiment with 14 healthy volunteers who performed visual discrimination and matching tasks. Visual targets were preceded by either frequent tactile distracters or rare, novel nociceptive stimuli delivered via laser pulses. The study manipulated working memory involvement using 0-back conditions (responding to the current stimulus) and 1-back conditions (responding based on the previous stimulus, requiring active rehearsal). Crucially, the two tasks were selected because they had opposite effects on baseline reaction times: the 1-back discrimination task facilitated performance, while the 1-back matching task impaired it. This design allowed the authors to dissociate the specific role of working memory from general resource demands. The results demonstrated that in the 0-back conditions, novel nociceptive stimuli significantly increased reaction times compared to tactile distracters, confirming attentional capture. However, in the 1-back conditions, where working memory was actively engaged, the nociceptive stimuli no longer slowed reaction times. This protective effect occurred regardless of whether the working memory task generally improved or worsened performance. Supplementary analyses confirmed that these findings were not driven by conflict resolution demands or other executive functions. The study concludes that loading working memory with pain-unrelated, task-relevant information reduces the ability of nociceptive input to involuntarily capture attention. This suggests that working memory acts as a top-down filter, maintaining active goal priorities and preventing bottom-up shifts of attention toward irrelevant distracters. These findings imply that efficient control over pain-related distraction is achieved by keeping pain-related information out of task settings and actively rehearsing relevant cognitive goals, offering insights into how cognitive strategies might mitigate the disruptive effects of pain in daily activities.

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• attention selective divided