Understanding the mechanisms through which spatial attention acts on nociception.

Previous studies have shown that spatial attention can influence the magnitude of brain responses to nociceptive inputs. In their recent article (Franz M, Nickel MM, Ritter A, Miltner WH, Weiss T. J Neurophysiol 113: 2760-2768, 2015), Franz and colleagues expand this observation by showing that spatial attention is further able to modify the chronometry of nociceptive processing by modulating the latency and temporal jitter of the recorded responses. The mechanisms through which attention could possibly modulate nociceptive processing are discussed here, with a particular focus on novel findings and future perspectives.