Different modalities of painful somatosensory stimulations affect anticipatory cortical processes: A high-resolution EEG study

After each stimulus, the subject reported the perceived stimulus intensity. Surface Laplacian estimation of the EEG data spatially enhanced the anticipatory stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN), which reflects motivational relevance of the stimulus. Subjects perceived no difference in the intensity of the electrical versus laser stimuli in both painful and nonpainful conditions. However, the anticipatory SPN appeared over large scalp regions before painful laser but not electrical stimulation. The same was true for the nonpainful stimulations. The present results suggest that the motivational anticipatory cortical processes are induced by nonpainful and painful biologically/ecologically relevant laser stimuli rather than by “artificial” electrical stimuli with similar intensity.