Liberati, GiuliaLeu, ChiaraForest, SébastienSébastienForest2025-05-142025-05-142025-05-142024https://hdl.handle.net/2078.2/36678Knowledge of how pain is encoded in the brain can unlock new horizons for many pathological conditions. While chronic pain is a great example of a pathology that would benefit from novel treatment methods, in reality any condition that inflicts pain could become much more comfortable to live with. As centuries of research slowly assemble the pieces of the puzzle showing how painful perception is processed neurally, the image painted so far depicts an absence of clear neural response specific to pain. One of the latest novelty in the pain research is the study of ongoing oscillations. Some of this spontaneous wave-like cortical activity has shown to be correlated to sustained thermonociception in deeper brain regions, and specific frequency bands (notably theta, alpha, and beta) have been related to parts of the pain encoding mechanism, specifically the conscious top-down attention functions like expectation or distraction. It is not yet known if these ongoing oscillations are specific to pain or if they can serve other purposes as well. As part of a larger work package on attention modulation of pain perception, the main experiment presented in this thesis aims to see if these modulations can be consistently found with another attention modulation : saliency. The goal is to identify potential ongoing oscillation modulations linked to saliency processing induced by noxious thermal stimuli. Five participants were subjected to long-lasting (80 sec) periodic painful stimulations at a base frequency of .5Hz, with every fourth heat wave (frequency of .125Hz) being of higher intensity or of lower intensity to control against specificity to pain intensity response. Analysis of the EEG data revealed modulations of the alpha and beta frequency bands at the frequency of interest (.125Hz), possibly correlating a neural response to saliency processing of thermonociceptive stimuli. Unfortunately, the pain was often reported as excruciating by the participants. Real-time ratings during stimulations confirmed this high pain report. It might be required to reconsider the experiment parameters before recruiting additional participants to reduce the extreme pain at the higher intensity stimuli while keeping the consistent lower pain felt throughout the stimulations.Ongoing OscillationsFrequency-taggingPainSaliencyOddball Paradigmtext::thesis::master thesisthesis:44294