Topic: Pain expectations

Pain expectations are formed by learning the association between specific circumstances and the occurrence of pain. These expectations are known to influence pain perception. Whether this learning is statistically optimal remains debated. If it is, the learning process of the participant should reflect their perception of the precision of each observation (stochasticity) and of the instability of the environment (volatility).Further, it is unclear whether inter-individual differences observed in experimental pain learning studies are due to temporary states or intrinsic traits.To probe these q

Humans continuously learn the properties of their environment, allowing them to predict and prepare for future (sensory) events. Bayesian predictive processing posits that these expectations play a major role in sensory processing, perception being the result of their integration with sensory evidence in this framework. Placebo hypoalgesia (when expectations of pain relief are sufficient to relieve pain) is probably the best example of expectations biassing perception. In this experiment, we manipulated pain expectations using a classic probabilistic reversal learning task (2 visual cues assoc