• Yadira Roa Romero, Thomas Straube, Alexander Nitsch, Wolfgang H R Miltner, and Thomas Weiss.
• Department of Biological and Clinical Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany.
• Pain. 2013 Jan 1;154(1):135-40.

AbstractThe interaction between intensity of nociceptive stimuli and cognitive load in a concomitant task is still a challenging and complex topic. Here, we investigated the interaction between top-down factors (i.e., perceptual load), induced by a visual task, and bottom-up factors (i.e., intensity of nociceptive stimuli that implicitly modifies saliency of input). Using a new experimental paradigm, in which perceptual load is varied while laser heat stimuli of different intensities are processed; we show a significant interaction between intensity of nociceptive stimuli and perceptual load on both pain ratings and task performance. High perceptual load specifically reduced intensity ratings of high intensity stimuli. However, under this condition, task performance was impaired, regardless of interindividual differences in motivation and pain catastrophizing. Thus, we showed that pain ratings can be reduced by increasing the load of attentional resources at the perceptual level of a non-pain-related task. Nevertheless, the disruptive effect of highly intensive nociceptive stimuli on the performance of the perceptual task was evident only under high load.Copyright © 2012 International Association for the Study of Pain. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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