Examining the Impact of Chronic Pain on Information Processing Behavior: An Exploratory Eye-Tracking Study

Chronic pain is a multifaceted complex experience that is often captured with self-reported measures. While subjective self-reported measures capture pain from a patient’s point of view, they are limited in information richness. Collecting eye movements when completing self-reported subjective pain measures provides valuable insight about information processing and decision behavior. This information can improve the information richness of self-reported pain measures by providing a broader view of an individual’s pain experience. How people process information and make decisions when completing pain measures can also help to investigate the cognitive-evaluative aspects of chronic pain, which in turn can provide insight for developing eye-tracking biomarkers of chronic pain, and by doing so help develop smart clinician support technologies. Our preliminary results show that people with chronic pain expended significantly more cognitive effort than their pain-free counterparts when completing three self-reported pain measures that are widely used in clinical settings. These results are promising because they suggest that eye movements may serve as valuable information to accompany self-reported pain scores and thus enable effective assessment and management of chronic pain. The results also suggest that eye movements may serve as suitable biomarkers of chronic pain.