Pain chronisity and attention control

大量证据表明，疼痛知觉与认知功能之间存在着相关性。本研究采用认知任务之一的工作记忆任务，对工作记忆容量与疼痛知觉的关系进行了研究。与无任务和控制任务相比，记忆任务条件下的主观疼痛强度降低（p <0.05），并且与工作记忆容量相关（r = 0.584，p <0.001），阅读广度任务证实了这一点，记忆任务表现无差异，但控制任务表现与疼痛强度变化相同。我们的研究结果表明，大脑中与信息处理（包括疼痛感知）相关的能力可能是有限的。因此，如果人们有很大的工作记忆容量，他们就有能力在处理认知任务的同时对疼痛进行准确的评估。

Substantial evidence revealed that pain perception and cognitive function was related each other. We conducted the research that shows the relationship of the working memory capacity and pain perception using a working memory task, which is one of the cognitive task. Subjective pain intensity decreased in the memory task condition compared to no-task and control task condition (p <0.05) and % decrease was correlated with working memory capacity which was confirmed by the reading span task (r = 0.584, p <0.001).There was no difference in memory task performance, but exhibited the same results in the control task performance as the pain intensity change. Our results revealed that the capacity in the brain related to information processing including pain perception might be limited. Therefore, in case that people had large working memory capacity, they had the ability to perform accurate evaluation of the pain simultaneously with the processing of the cognitive task.