Pain draws visual attention to its location: experimental evidence for a threat-related bias

It has been often demonstrated that pain interferes with the processing of other information. However, the initiation of protective behavior in response to pain also requires enhanced processing of potentially relevant information, such as stimuli sharing the same spatial coordinates. In this study we test whether pain draws visual attention to its location. We report 2 experiments in which healthy individuals detected visual stimuli at 2 possible locations. Each stimulus was preceded by painful stimulation at the corresponding (congruent trial) or noncorresponding (incongruent trial) location. Based on the probability ratio of congruent to incongruent trials, pain was either spatially informative (experiment 1) or uninformative (experiment 2) for visual target detection. The detection of visual stimuli was faster at the pain location than at the other location in both experiments suggesting efficient spatially guided orienting and responding to potential sources of somatic threat. However, when pain was spatially uninformative, visual attention was only drawn to the pain location when pain was perceived as threatening. This indicates that threatening pain prioritizes the processing of visual information at its location, even if the pain is irrelevant for the upcoming visual event.

In this study a threat-related processing bias of visual information on a painful body location was demonstrated. This finding advances our knowledge on how pain modulates attention. More particularly, it seems that interruption by pain is not absolute and that pain prioritizes the processing of other perceptual information that it spatially related to the pain.