The Effect of Thermal Pain on Working Memory: Behavioral Evidence from the n-Back Task

Pain and working memory interact bidirectionally, yet most paradigms treat pain as an extraneous distractor rather than task-relevant content. This study investigated whether thermal sensations can be encoded and updated in working memory in an n-back paradigm. Nineteen healthy adults completed visual (location) and thermal (temperature) single n-back tasks, cross-modal conditions with task-irrelevant distractors, and a dual n-back task across three load levels (1-, 2-, 3-back). Results showed that thermal cues consistently yielded lower accuracy and longer response times (RTs) compared to visual cues (p < 0.001, q < 0.001). While task-irrelevant thermal input tended to prolong RTs in the visual task under low load (p = 0.033, q = 0.099), task-irrelevant visual input showed a trend-level improvement in thermal-task accuracy under high load (3-back; p = 0.020, q = 0.060), consistent with a potential cross-modal effect. Qualitative data indicated that participants strategically transcoded thermal sensations into word or numerical labels to support maintenance. These findings demonstrate that pain can be operationalized as mnemonic content, though its processing incurs significant executive costs due to transcoding demands and resource competition. By shifting focus from “pain-as-interference” to “pain-as-content”, this paradigm offers a principled approach for the mechanistic study of nociceptive working memory updating and provides a foundation for quantifying cognitive interference in clinical pain populations.