THEMATIC AREA A - PROJECTS OF 1. FUNDING PERIOD

PD Dr. Ulrike Bingel

Dept. of Neurology & Dept. of Systems Neuroscience, UKE  

The focus of this project is the attentional consequence of pain in term of its interaction with ongoing pro-cesses. Specifically, we want to elucidate how the different components of the pain experience drive its at-tention demanding properties and to understand where in the brain this critical interaction of the ‘pain ma-trix’ and attentional networks take place. Therefore, we will modulate the perception of physically identical heat pain stimuli by three different contextual manipulations and evaluate the associated attentional conse-quences in a well established paradigm of visual processing. In a fourth part of this project, we will study patients with Parkinson’s disease as a model for disturbed executive function that should result in a dysbal-ance between pain and attentional processes and thus contribute to the high prevalence of chronic pain in this patient group.