The effect of pain on task switching: pain reduces accuracy and increases reaction times across multiple switching paradigms

Pain disrupts attention, which may have negative consequences for daily life for people with acute or chronic pain. It has been suggested that switching between tasks may leave us particularly susceptible to pain-related attentional disruption, because we need to disengage our attention from one task before shifting it onto another. Switching tasks typically elicit lower accuracies and/or longer reaction times when participants switch to a new task compared to repeating the same task, and pain may exacerbate this effect. We present three studies to test this hypothesis. In Study 1, participants completed two versions of an alternating runs switching task under pain free and thermal pain induction conditions. Pain did not affect performance on either task. In Studies 2 and 3, we examined seven versions of the switching task using large general population samples, experiencing a variety of naturally-occurring pain conditions, recruited and tested on the internet. On all tasks, participants with pain had longer reaction times on both switch and repeat trials compared to participants without pain, but pain did not increase switch costs. In Studies 2 and 3, we also investigated the effects of type of pain, duration of pain, and analgesics on task performance. We conclude that pain has a small dampening effect on performance overall on switching tasks. This suggests that pain interrupts attention even when participants are engaged in a trial, not only when attention has been disengaged for shifting to a new task set

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

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

Effect of task difficulty and sex on memory for number of words generated amongst those in the pain condition.

<p>(error bars reflect standard error of mean).</p

Effect of pain and task type on perceived difficulty levels during the word generation task.

<p>(error bars reflect standard error of mean).</p

Effect of task difficulty and sex on memory for number of words generated amongst those in the no pain condition.

<p>(error bars reflect standard error of mean).</p

Means and standard deviations (in parenthesis) for recalled task performance on the word generation task.

<p>Means and standard deviations (in parenthesis) for recalled task performance on the word generation task.</p

Means and standard deviations (in parenthesis) for actual task performance on the word generation task.

<p>Means and standard deviations (in parenthesis) for actual task performance on the word generation task.</p