Performance of healthy persons under pain in different cognitive load tasks: An event‐related potential study on experimental pain individuals

OBJECTIVE: This study aims to determine how brain activities underlying task with different cognitive load would be modulated by the painful state using electroencephalography. METHODS: The pain state was established by spraying capsaicin on subjects’ left inner forearm. A total of 20 experimental pain subjects and 20 matched nonpain controls underwent cognitive tasks with electroencephalogram recording. We collected and analyzed behavioral and event‐related potential (ERP) data. RESULTS: High cognitive tasks exhibited significantly longer response times and lower accuracies than low‐load tasks. The experimental pain group displayed a significantly lower accuracy than the control group. In addition, the experimental pain group showed no significance between high and low cognitive tasks in early ERP components (amplitude of N1, P2, N2, and early part of late positive potential), whereas the control group exhibited significance between different load tasks. Furthermore, we observed a delay peak energy for delta and theta oscillation in Fz 500–800 ms after the onset for pain persons and high cognitive load tasks. CONCLUSIONS: Inadequate early attention modulation, along with delayed peak energy for brain oscillation (delta and theta), could be accountable for a worse performance in cognitive tasks in the experimental pain group. Thus, cognitive load is a highly considerable factor. Overall, this study offers more insights into how healthy population works with cognitive tasks under pain neurologically.