Healthy participants, without prior physical or psychiatric illnesses and without physical (pain) complaints, will be subjected to one out of six experiments involving different kinds of attention manipulations.
Conditions
Interventions
The participants will receive electrocutaneous stimuli while performing either distraction tasks and while actively attending the electrocutaneous stimuli. Distraction tasks are mental-arithmetic task
Sponsors
University of Twente
Eligibility
Inclusion criteria
Inclusion criteria: 1. Healthy persons aged 18-35 years with normal or corrected-to-normal vision; 2. Gender criteria: N/A.
Exclusion criteria
Exclusion criteria: 1. Persons who used alcohol or psycho-active drugs in the 24 hours prior to the experiment; 2. Persons who took coffee or smoked in the hour prior to the experiment; 3. Persons with prior history of physical or psychiatric illnesses, and physical (pain) complaints.
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame |
|---|---|
| The effects of sustained distraction on the processing of these stimuli will be investigated using EEG measurements. The effect of distraction is observed when the event related potentials (evoked by the electrocutaneous stimuli) are smaller in the distraction conditions compared to the attend conditions. When this is observed one can say that distraction has an attenuating effect on painful stimulus processing. | — |
Secondary
| Measure | Time frame |
|---|---|
| The effects of distracting electrocutaneous stimuli on the performance of attention demanding tasks will be measured. | — |
Contacts
Public ContactJ.H.G. Blom
P.O. Box 217
Outcome results
None listed