Effects of response conflict on pain-evoked medial prefrontal cortex activity

A connectionist modeling study of the neural mechanisms underlying pain's ability to reorient attention

Connectionist modeling was used to investigate the brain mechanisms responsible for pain's ability to shift attention away from another stimulus modality and toward itself. Different connectionist model architectures were used to simulate the different possible brain mechanisms underlying this attentional bias, where nodes in the model simulated the brain areas thought to mediate the attentional bias, and the connections between the nodes simulated the interactions between the brain areas. Mathematical optimization techniques were used to find the model parameters, such as connection strengths, that produced the best quantitative fits of reaction time and event-related potential data obtained in our previous work. Of the several architectures tested, two produced excellent quantitative fits of the experimental data. One involved an unexpected pain stimulus activating somatic threat detectors in the dorsal posterior insula. This threat detector activity was monitored by the medial prefrontal cortex, which in turn evoked a phasic response in the locus coeruleus. The locus coeruleus phasic response resulted in a facilitation of the cortical areas involved in decision and response processes time-locked to the painful stimulus. The second architecture involved the presence of pain causing an increase in general arousal. The increase in arousal was mediated by locus coeruleus tonic activity, which facilitated responses in the cortical areas mediating the sensory, decision, and response processes involved in the task. These two neural network architectures generated competing predictions that can be tested in future studies.

Neural mechanisms underlying pain's ability to reorient attention: evidence for sensitization of somatic threat detectors

Pain typically signals damage to the body, and as such can be perceived as threatening and can elicit a strong emotional response. This ecological significance undoubtedly underlies pain's well-known ability to demand attention. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this ability are poorly understood. Previous work from the author's laboratory has reported behavioral evidence suggesting that participants disengage their attention from an incorrectly cued visual target stimulus and reorient it toward a somatic target more rapidly when the somatic target is painful than when it is nonpainful. Furthermore, electrophysiological data suggest that this effect is mediated by a stimulus-driven process, in which somatic threat detectors located in the dorsal posterior insula activate the medial and lateral prefrontal cortex areas involved in reorienting attention toward the painful target. In these previous studies, the painful and nonpainful somatic targets were given in separate experiments involving different participants. Here, the nonpainful and painful somatic targets were presented in random order within the same block of trials. Unlike in the previous studies, both the nonpainful and painful somatic targets activated the somatic threat detectors, and the times taken to disengage and reorient attention were the same for both. These electrophysiological and behavioral data suggest that somatic threat detectors can become sensitized to nonpainful somatic stimuli that are presented in a context that includes painful stimuli.