Caroline Phelps

Poppy is “helping” me read this paper today

A big thank you to The University of Arizona's Pain and Addiction Center for giving me pilot funds to do this study!

Plus a big shout out to my wonderful mentor @doctor-bob.bsky.social, plus the brilliant second author Larissa Oliveira, and the excellent undergrads also listed.

a man with long hair and a mustache has a sticky note on his jacket that says " i dont care " ALT: a man with long hair and a mustache has a sticky note on his jacket that says " i dont care "

To conclude... have pain? As Estonia's Eurovision entry would say "No stresso" your working memory may be OK-o!

We did have some limitations - our chronic pain group were highly functioning undergraduates who had relatively low levels of pain severity and interference, so pain may not have been sufficient to cause deficits.

But this group is certainly worthy of study, particularly for looking at resilience.

This adds to the growing literature suggesting that pain itself may not be the cause of deficits in working memory.

BUT the pain of null results...

Acute pain had no effect on response time or accuracy in younger or older folks

Chronic pain had no effect on response time or accuracy

Suggesting a lack of pain effect on working memory in the Sternberg Task

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🙂We saw pain reported at levels consistent with other papers

😊That lovely Sternberg effect

😀As well as decreased accuracy in older people, suggesting impaired working memory

I was as excited as Estonia's entry in Eurovision was excited about an Espresso Macchiato

We thought the ideal task to test both of these hypotheses was the Sternberg Task.

⭐5 levels of difficulty
⭐Response time increases with items in working memory (see fig - look at that lovely line!)
⭐ ideal for testing both limited slots in working memory and arousal hypotheses ⭐

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High levels of pain + a difficult task = not enough slots in working memory to do the task well

But pain is also arousing and performance of cognitive tasks depends on optimum arousal levels - as seen in this gif. Could pain be taking us over optimum arousal levels?

Pain is generally thought to cause deficits in working memory - information that you can recall and manipulate over a short time period.

The prevailing hypothesis is that this is through pain taking up slots in working memory - which is limited to 7(ish!) slots

Is the pain of null data taking up slots in your working memory? Or shifting you over optimum arousal on the Yerkes Dodson curve?

Not for me! I've externalized it to this lovely preprint!

Plus, read on for why it might not be the pain that causes deficits in your working memory... 🧵

Poppy, Stella and Noelle 100% agree with this writeup

Carriers of SCN9A variants linked to inherited and acquired pain syndromes show no alteration in the prevalence of pain or analgesic usage in the UK Biobank cohort The voltage-gated sodium channel NaV1.7, encoded by the SCN9A gene, is integral to nociceptor excitability and pain sensation. Multiple gain-of-function SCN9A variants have been reported to cause auto...

When is a "pathogenic" variant in a classic pain gene (NaV1.7) not pathogenic? When its carried by many thousands of people and has no evidence of a pain phenotype or analgesic prescriptions... We need to reconsider how we assign pathogenicity to these variants.

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Temporal fMRI Dynamics Map Dopamine Physiology Spatial variations in dopamine function are linked to cognition and substance use disorders but are challenging to characterize with current methods. Because dopamine influences blood vessel dilation,...

Interested in dopamine? Have fMRI data? We’ve identified a temporal BOLD feature that carries rich information about dopamine physiology. This measure, obtainable from resting-state and task fMRI, opens new ways to indirectly probe dopamine’s role in cognition and disease. 1/n tinyurl.com/bddyz67b

Thermosensory predictive coding underpins an illusion of pain Computational modeling reveals how uncertainty transforms harmless stimuli into perceptions of pain.

Excited to share our latest publication, out now in @ScienceAdvances: “Thermosensory predictive coding underpins an illusion of pain.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/.... Read the full thread for details!

Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision making via access to detailed events Our experiences contain countless details that may be important in the future, yet we rarely know which will matter and which won't. This uncertainty poses a difficult challenge for adaptive decision ...

Why do we remember so many details of our experiences even when it is unclear if we will actually ever need them?

In a new preprint, @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I asked whether this property is adaptive, because what will be relevant in the future often (usually?!) isn’t apparent.

***New paper from our lab*** By Jennika Veinot

Low working memory underpins the association between aberrant functional properties of pain modulation circuitry and chronic back pain severity.

Journal of PAIN, 2025

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#pain #neuroscience #cognition

Rats can distinguish (and generalize) among two white wine varieties - Animal Cognition In the olfactory literature there is considerable debate about how differences in olfactory receptors across different species map onto variations in perceptual acuity and performance. Although humans...

Can you blind taste and guess Sauvignon Blanc from Riesling? If so, congrats—they’re pretty different! But just know… rats can too. 🐀🍾 h/t @cprofaci.bsky.social
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

ala Great British Baking show, academic sitting on floor staring into oven (parallel to email from editor)

Guilty, as charged

#AcademicSky
#AcademicWriting

This work was completed with lots of wonderful people, particularly the PI, Dr. Horizon Task himself, @doctor-bob.bsky.social as well as all the technicians and undergrads in our big author list.

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But this comes at the detriment of less random exploration. Which may be why it's harder to teach an old dog new tricks

We found that older adults have a lower signal to noise ratio, which could result in more errors.

BUT older adults also had a higher threshold for decision making.

Potentially this is a healthy aging adaption which helps to reduce errors, as older adults outperformed younger adults.

Older adults use less random exploration, so how does this happen?

We focus on the drift diffusion model, where evidence for a decision is noisily accumulated over time, until it passes the threshold for one option or the other.

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A good way to look at this is sending our participants to a virtual Vegas, playing a choice of two slot machines in the Horizon Task.

In which the amount of info they receive about both slot machines varies as well as how long they have to use that info - so how advantageous it is to explore

There are two strategies to exploring:
* Directed exploration is an explicit bias towards choosing more informative options.
* Random exploration- a ‘noisy’ choice selection, where choices are less obviously tied to the value of options.

In contrast, exploiting and staying in academia could lead to you publishing exciting preprints, but leave you forever wondering if you could have done well on the Great British Bake Off.

The balance between exploring and exploiting shifts towards less exploration in older people

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We are faced with many 'explore-exploit' decisions throughout our lives. For instance, the eternal postdoc conundrum, do you continue you exploit what you know and continue in academia or explore a new career as a baker?

Exploring a career as a baker could lead to a life making beautiful cakes or..

Are you feeling stuck in your ways? Less excited about exploring anything new? You may be aging!

Read on for insight into why your decision making is changing.

Maybe its the same for emeritus professors?!