Pain affects the lives of many individuals by creating physical, psychological, and economic burdens. A critical psychological factor negatively affected by pain is one's ability to sustain attention. In order to better understand the effect of pain on sustained attention we conducted three experiments utilizing the psychomotor vigilance task, thought probes, and pupillometry. In Experiment 1, participants in acute pain exhibited overall poorer task performance. However, this effect was localized to the relative frequency and duration of the participants' slowest responses with their faster responses being equivalent to a no-pain control group. In Experiment 2, we replicated the procedure and included periodic thought probes to overtly measure subjective experiences during the task. Participants in pain reported fewer "on-task" thoughts and more thoughts directed toward the source of their pain. In Experiment 3, we replicated the procedure while simultaneously tracking pupillary dynamics using an eye-tracker. Participants in pain had smaller task-evoked pupillary responses, which is thought to be an indicator of task engagement. However, the behavioral effects of pain from Experiments 1 and 2 were not replicated in Experiment 3. Taken together, pain led to poorer performance in the form of an increase in the relative frequency and extremeness of slow responses, increases in off-task thoughts, and reductions in a physiological indicator of task engagement. These data speak to theories of how pain competes with task goals for attention and negatively impacts behavior. The broader implications of this work are the identification of a low-level mechanism by which pain can interfere with normal cognitive functioning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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急性疼痛会损害持续注意力。

疼痛通过造成身体、心理和经济负担影响许多人的生活。受疼痛负面影响的一个关键心理因素是一个人维持注意力的能力。为了更好地了解疼痛对持续注意力的影响，我们利用精神运动警觉任务、思维探测和瞳孔测量进行了三个实验。在实验 1 中，急性疼痛的参与者表现出总体较差的任务表现。然而，这种影响仅限于参与者最慢反应的相对频率和持续时间，他们更快的反应相当于无痛对照组。在实验 2 中，我们复制了该程序并包括定期的思维探测，以公开测量任务期间的主观体验。疼痛的参与者报告的“任务”较少 更多的想法指向他们痛苦的根源。在实验 3 中，我们复制了该过程，同时使用眼动仪跟踪瞳孔动态。疼痛的参与者有较小的任务诱发瞳孔反应，这被认为是任务参与的指标。然而，实验 1 和 2 的疼痛对行为的影响并没有在实验 3 中复制。总之，疼痛会导致表现不佳，表现为反应迟缓的相对频率和极端程度增加，非任务思维增加，和减少任务参与的生理指标。这些数据说明了疼痛如何与任务目标竞争注意力并对行为产生负面影响的理论。这项工作的更广泛意义是确定疼痛可以干扰正常认知功能的低级机制。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2021 APA，保留所有权利）。