A big thank you to The University of Arizona's Pain and Addiction Center for giving me pilot funds to do this study!

Plus a big shout out to my wonderful mentor @doctor-bob.bsky.social, plus the brilliant second author Larissa Oliveira, and the excellent undergrads also listed.

To conclude... have pain? As Estonia's Eurovision entry would say "No stresso" your working memory may be OK-o!

We did have some limitations - our chronic pain group were highly functioning undergraduates who had relatively low levels of pain severity and interference, so pain may not have been sufficient to cause deficits.

But this group is certainly worthy of study, particularly for looking at resilience.

This adds to the growing literature suggesting that pain itself may not be the cause of deficits in working memory.

BUT the pain of null results...

Acute pain had no effect on response time or accuracy in younger or older folks

Chronic pain had no effect on response time or accuracy

Suggesting a lack of pain effect on working memory in the Sternberg Task

🙂We saw pain reported at levels consistent with other papers

😊That lovely Sternberg effect

😀As well as decreased accuracy in older people, suggesting impaired working memory

I was as excited as Estonia's entry in Eurovision was excited about an Espresso Macchiato

We thought the ideal task to test both of these hypotheses was the Sternberg Task.

⭐5 levels of difficulty
⭐Response time increases with items in working memory (see fig - look at that lovely line!)
⭐ ideal for testing both limited slots in working memory and arousal hypotheses ⭐

High levels of pain + a difficult task = not enough slots in working memory to do the task well

But pain is also arousing and performance of cognitive tasks depends on optimum arousal levels - as seen in this gif. Could pain be taking us over optimum arousal levels?

Pain is generally thought to cause deficits in working memory - information that you can recall and manipulate over a short time period.

The prevailing hypothesis is that this is through pain taking up slots in working memory - which is limited to 7(ish!) slots

This work was completed with lots of wonderful people, particularly the PI, Dr. Horizon Task himself, @doctor-bob.bsky.social as well as all the technicians and undergrads in our big author list.

But this comes at the detriment of less random exploration. Which may be why it's harder to teach an old dog new tricks

We found that older adults have a lower signal to noise ratio, which could result in more errors.

BUT older adults also had a higher threshold for decision making.

Potentially this is a healthy aging adaption which helps to reduce errors, as older adults outperformed younger adults.

Older adults use less random exploration, so how does this happen?

We focus on the drift diffusion model, where evidence for a decision is noisily accumulated over time, until it passes the threshold for one option or the other.

A good way to look at this is sending our participants to a virtual Vegas, playing a choice of two slot machines in the Horizon Task.

In which the amount of info they receive about both slot machines varies as well as how long they have to use that info - so how advantageous it is to explore