The influence of attention on the processing of painful stimuli and vice versa.

Being able to sense pain is essential for human survival; it warns is if
something is wrong with our body or when it is expected to go wrong. Action can
be taken in these cases. For example, a child reaches out for a hot pan on the
stove. The perception of pain causes the child to retract his/her hand from the
hot pan. Damage could have been the result when the child was unable to react
or when it would react to slow. Although useful, pain also occurs after an
operation or when there is no threat to the body. Pain management tools are
still insufficient in most of these cases. Earlier research has shown that the
subjective pain experience of participants for acute pain stimuli is changed
when attention is directed at the stimuli or when it is distracted from it. The
effects of attention manipulations on the cortical processing of pain stimuli
are still rather unclear and no consensuses are being made in the literature.
Does attention manipulation have an effect on the early somatosensory
processing of stimuli or at later stage in stimulus processing? For example at
the source were the stimuli gets its emotional or motivational value? Questions
like these will be answered with the proposed experiments.

Gaining insight in the modulating effects of attention on the processing of
short electrocutaneous painful and non-painful stimuli by comparing the
patterns in brain activity en subjective measurements during different
conditions of attention.
Assessing pain experience and SEPs in different distraction conditions in which
attention is directed towards the pain experience, attention is directed
towards a distraction task or in which attention is directed to a different
location.
Assessing the modulating effect of pain processing on attention, in which
electrocutaneous stimuli diverts attention away from the execution of the task
at hand.
Assessing possible sources of pain processing as well as assessing the
interactions between these sources and what the effect of attention is on these
interactions.

Six experiments will be conducted which can give answers to the above mentioned
objectives. These experiments will assess the effects of attention on pain
processing using distraction or trough spatial attention manipulations, or
both. The influence of pain on attention will be assessed using two N-back
tasks and an attentional blink task.
This is an observational scientific study. A within-subjects design is used.
Attentional manipulations modulated trials are semi-randomly divided between or
within experimental blocks; all conditions are equally divided over blocks.

Non-painful and painful electrocutaneous stimuli will be presented to the
participants during the experiments.

Subjects will be asked not to use alcohol or psycho-active drugs in 24 hours
previous to the measurements, and not to smoke or drink coffee one hour prior
to participation. The individual experiments will take about two and a halve
hours to complete.

No invasive or medical intervention will be used. The individual pain tolerance
threshold for all participants is measured in a pretest. With these individual
pain thresholds it is possible to account for possible differences in
individual pain experience and therefore it is possible to keep the pain
stimuli under personal pain thresholds.

The EEG equipment and the pain stimulators are extensively checked and it can
be concluded that no risk are associated with participation in these
experiments.