Find it here: Altered Decision-Making Across Acute and Chronic Pain States Authors: Chad Williams*, Lucy Owen*, Chloe Gunsilius, Matthew Nassar, Frederike Petzschner (*equal contribution) 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
This may offer a computational marker of pain chronification—and a target for future intervention. If we can detect when value computation shifts and what causes it, we might intervene before pain becomes chronic.
What does this mean? It suggests that chronic pain may foster maladaptive, habit-like choices. Even when conditions change, people may stay stuck in old avoidance patterns—because their brains rely on short-term reinforcement, not big-picture value.
Crucially, this shift in decision-making was linked to how long someone had been in pain, not how intense the pain was. 🕒 Duration not 🔥 Severity This supports the idea that prolonged pain gradually reconfigures cognitive processes.
Interestingly, the acute pain group showed an intermediate pattern. Not quite healthy, not quite chronic. This suggests a potential transitional cognitive profile—a window into the process of chronification.
Computational Modeling confirmed that people with chronic pain put less weight on global expected value and more on local reinforcement history. Such that choices are more biased towards the context in which they were learned in.
Here is what we found: Chronic pain systematically shifts reward-based decision-making. Compared to pain-free individuals, participants with chronic pain relied more on context-specific reinforcement history and less on globally integrated expected value.
Chronic pain is known to impact decision-making. But how exactly? We studied 239 people - in a state of no pain, acute pain or chronic pain- using a reinforcement learning task that teases apart choices based on: 🧠 Global expected values 📍 Context-specific reinforcement history
NEW PREPRINT OUT! Being in a state of pain changes how we decide. 📄 Altered Decision-Making Across Acute and Chronic Pain States 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
This was one of the best experiences I’ve had in science! Beyond excited that this collaboration made it out into the world — and turned into a TiCS paper! 🧠❤️
If you are at the Keystone Meeting on #Interoception: Neural Sensing and Control of Organ Function @alleninstitute.bsky.social make sure to check out the posters of my amazing students who will present their work on pain, cardioception and computational modeling...see the list below:
So proud of our Chloe Gunsilius, who defended her PhD last week! Her work on #ChronicConditions and #MindBodyInteractions is bound to make a difference for patients.
This past week, I had the honor of speaking at the Bhutan Innovation Forum and meeting Their Majesties, the King and Queen of Bhutan. It was inspiring to hear the visionary plans for the country and I'm excited to explore more of Bhutan. If you're in the area, please feel free to connect!
