TY  - JOUR
AV  - public
CY  - Thousand Oaks, Calif. ; London
VL  - 31
N2  - The notion that reward inhibits pain is a well-supported observation in both humans and animals, allowing suppression of pain reflexes to acquired rewarding stimuli. However, a blanket inhibition of pain by reward would also impair pain discrimination. In contrast, early counterconditioning experiments implied that reward might actually spare pain
discrimination. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether discriminative performance was enhanced or inhibited by reward. We found in adult human volunteers (N = 25) that pain-based discriminative ability is actually enhanced by reward, especially when reward is directly contingent on discriminative performance. Drift-diffusion modeling
shows that this relates to an augmentation of the underlying sensory signal strength and is not merely an effect of decision bias. This enhancement of sensory-discriminative pain-information processing suggests that whereas reward can promote reward-acquiring behavior by inhibition of pain in some circumstances, it can also facilitate important discriminative information of the sensory input when necessary.
N1  - Dieser Beitrag ist aufgrund einer (DFG-geförderten) Allianz bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich. *** This publication is freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.
ID  - heidok29137
SN  - 0956-7976 (Druck-Ausg.), 1467-9280 (Online-Ausg.)
JF  - Psychological Science
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620939588
EP  - 1199
Y1  - 2020///
A1  - Becker, Susanne
A1  - Löffler, Martin
A1  - Seymour, Ben
PB  - Sage (Publ.)
KW  - pain perception
KW  -  discrimination
KW  -  reward
KW  -  drift-diffusion model
KW  -  response bias
KW  -  sensory strength
IS  - 9
SP  - 1191
TI  - Reward Enhances Pain Discrimination in Humans
ER  -