Topic: inferential confidence

Pain perception is a warning signal enabling animals to preserve their body integrity. When pain persists over time, the brain needs to learn to predict its temporal evolution in order to minimize harm. Whereas several studies have already shown the effects of experience and expectations on responses to isolated nociceptive stimuli using axiomatic approaches, it remains largely unknown how individuals can learn to predict a stream of nociceptive events and how these processes are implemented in the brain. To clarify these aspects, we exposed healthy human participants (n = 31) to probabilistic