Phasic and tonic pain serve distinct functions during adaptive behaviour

Abstract Pain drives self-protective behaviour, and evolutionary theories suggest it acts over different timescales to serve distinct functions. Whilst phasic pain provides a teaching signal to drive avoidance of new injury, tonic pain is argued to support recuperative behaviour, for instance by reducing motivational vigour. We test this hypothesis in an immersive virtual reality EEG foraging task where subjects harvested fruit in a forest: some fruit elicited brief phasic pain to the grasping hand, and this reduced choice probability. Simultaneously, tonic pressure pain to the contralateral upper arm was associated with reduced action velocities. This could be explained by a free-operant computational framework that formalises and quantifies the function of tonic and phasic pain in terms of motivational vigour and decision value, and model parameters correlated with EEG responses. Overall, the results show how tonic and phasic pain subserve distinct objective motivational functions that support harm minimisation during ongoing adaptive behaviour.