Pain disrupts attentional processing across a range of tasks and pain types. This effect is changed by stimulus salience, such that stimuli such as pain-related words or emotional expressions are attended to differently. This study aimed to further explore this effect using the attentional blink across two studies. 

In the ABT, participants are presented with a stream of stimuli and asked to identify two targets. T1 is presented in a different text colour to the stimulus stream, and participants are asked to identify and remember T1. In half of trials, participants are also asked to identify a second target (T2), which appears after T1 and remains consistent throughout. T2 is presented in one of three positions in the stimulus stream; immediately after T1, 3 places after T1, or 7 places after T1. Typically, T2 is detected with high accuracy when presented in position 1 or 3, but accuracy drops at position 2. This deficit is the attentional blink effect. This research consists of two studies using the ABT; one using letter stimuli, the second using affective words. In both studies, participants completed the ABT twice, once normally and once whilst experiencing a headache.

Results show that, in the standard task, the blink window is shifted whilst in pain such that accuracy is poorer in position 1 compared to no-pain. In the emotional-word task, there was no effect of stimulus salience, although the same effect on blink performance was present, suggesting a top-down, rather than bottom-up, influence of pain on attention.

THE EFFECT OF PAIN AND STIMULUS SALIENCE ON TEMPORAL ATTENTION- A MULTI-STUDY EXAMINATION USING THE ATTENTIONAL BLINK TASK