ArticlePLoS biology2022
A multistudy analysis reveals that evoked pain intensity representation is distributed across brain systems.
Article in PLoS biology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 21 citations in OpenAlex.
- Fear, anxiety, and the extended amygdala-absence of evidence for strict functional segregation.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- [The brain today is yesterday's psyche].Orthopadie (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Fear, anxiety, and the extended amygdala-bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Decoding pain: uncovering the factors that affect the performance of neuroimaging-based pain models.Pain · 2025Article
- Decoding pain chronification: mechanisms of the acute-to-chronic transition.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2025Review
- Neuromarkers in addiction: definitions, development strategies, and recent advances.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 2024Review
- Towards a Real-Life Understanding of the Altered Functional Behaviour of the Default Mode and Salience Network in Chronic Pain: Are People with Chronic Pain Overthinking the Meaning of Their Pain?Journal of clinical medicine · 2024Review
- Chemogenetic Modulation of Posterior Insula CaMKIIa Neurons Alters Pain and Thermoregulation.The journal of pain · 2024Article
- Fractal Similarity of Pain Brain Networks.Advances in neurobiology · 2024Article
- Direct and Indirect Nociceptive Input from the Trigeminal Dorsal Horn to Pain-Modulating Neurons in the Rostral Ventromedial Medulla.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- When knowledge hurts: humans are willing to receive pain for obtaining non-instrumental information.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Computational and neural mechanisms of statistical pain learning.Nature communications · 2022Article
- The neural signature of the decision value of future pain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Limits of decoding mental states with fMRI.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2022Article
- Effect sizes and test-retest reliability of the fMRI-based neurologic pain signature.NeuroImage · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
12 authors at 11 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Information is coded in the brain at multiple anatomical scales: locally, distributed across regions and networks, and globally. For pain, the scale of representation has not been formally tested, and quantitative comparisons of pain representations across regions and networks are lacking. In this multistudy analysis of 376 participants across 11 studies, we compared multivariate predictive models to investigate the spatial scale and location of evoked heat pain intensity representation. We compared models based on (a) a single most pain-predictive region or resting-state network; (b) pain-associated cortical-subcortical systems developed from prior literature ("multisystem models"); and (c) a model spanning the full brain. We estimated model accuracy using leave-one-study-out cross-validation (CV; 7 studies) and subsequently validated in 4 independent holdout studies. All spatial scales conveyed information about pain intensity, but distributed, multisystem models predicted pain 20% more accurately than any individual region or network and were more generalizable to multimodal pain (thermal, visceral, and mechanical) and specific to pain. Full brain models showed no predictive advantage over multisystem models. These findings show that multiple cortical and subcortical systems are needed to decode pain intensity, especially heat pain, and that representation of pain experience may not be circumscribed by any elementary region or canonical network. Finally, the learner generalization methods we employ provide a blueprint for evaluating the spatial scale of information in other domains.
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