title: Using temporal order judgments to investigate attention bias toward pain and threat-related information. Methodological and theoretical issues.
abstract: Recently, Vanden Bulcke, Crombez, Durnez, and Van Damme (2015) investigated whether the attentional prioritization of a specific location due to the anticipation of pain is modality specific or multisensory. They used a temporal order judgment task in which participants judged the order of either two tactile or two visual stimuli, one presented on each hand. Additionally, participants either expected the occurrence of a painful stimulus on one hand or the absence of any pain. Results showed that participants' judgments were biased to the advantage of the stimuli, tactile or visual, presented at the location where pain was expected. The authors concluded that the anticipation of pain leads to a multisensory prioritization of information presented at the threatened spatial location. Here, we would like to question their conclusion in terms of a genuine attentional modulation of multisensory nature, based on methodological and theoretical grounds.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Neuroscience, Université catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium. Electronic address: lieve.filbrich@uclouvain.be.
authors.forename: Lieve
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Filbrich
authors.affiliation: Institute of Neuroscience, Université catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium.
authors.forename: Diana M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Torta
authors.affiliation: Institute of Neuroscience, Université catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium.
authors.forename: Camille
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Vanderclausen
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK.
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Azañón
authors.affiliation: Institute of Neuroscience, Université catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium.
authors.forename: Valéry
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Legrain
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D059031:Anticipation, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005239:Fear / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D059225:Nociception / Q000502:physiology*; D055698:Touch Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Attention; Nociception; Pain; Space; Temporal order judgement