Uncertainty in thermosensory expectations enhances an illusion of pain
Jesper Ehmsen, Niia Nikolova, Daniel Christensen, Leah Banellis, Malthe Brændholt, Arthur Courtin, Camilla Krænge, Alexandra Mitchell, Camila Deolindo, Christian Steenkjær, Melina Vejlø, Christoph Mathys, Micah Allen, Francesca Fardo · FENS Forum 2024
The human brain has a remarkable ability to learn and update its beliefs about the world. Here, we investigate how thermosensory learning shapes our subjective experience of innocuous temperature and the misperception of pain in response to harmless thermal stimuli. Through computational modeling, we demonstrate that the brain uses a probabilistic predictive coding scheme to update beliefs about temperature changes based on their uncertainty. We find that these expectations directly modulate the perception of pain in the thermal grill illusion as well as the constituent innocuous cold and warm
ePoster · Neuroscience