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Caroline Phelps

@carolinephelps.bsky.social
111 followers 165 following 22 posts

Chronic pain, decision making and memory | Postdoc at Georgia Tech in NRD lab | Tennis player | Loves tea, cake and a good book.

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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
Poppy is “helping” me read this paper today
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
A big thank you to The University of Arizona's Pain and Addiction Center for giving me pilot funds to do this study! Plus a big shout out to my wonderful mentor @doctor-bob.bsky.social, plus the brilliant second author Larissa Oliveira, and the excellent undergrads also listed.
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
To conclude... have pain? As Estonia's Eurovision entry would say "No stresso" your working memory may be OK-o!
media.tenor.com
a man with long hair and a mustache has a sticky note on his jacket that says " i dont care "
ALT: a man with long hair and a mustache has a sticky note on his jacket that says " i dont care "
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
We did have some limitations - our chronic pain group were highly functioning undergraduates who had relatively low levels of pain severity and interference, so pain may not have been sufficient to cause deficits. But this group is certainly worthy of study, particularly for looking at resilience.
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
This adds to the growing literature suggesting that pain itself may not be the cause of deficits in working memory.
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
BUT the pain of null results... Acute pain had no effect on response time or accuracy in younger or older folks Chronic pain had no effect on response time or accuracy Suggesting a lack of pain effect on working memory in the Sternberg Task
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
🙂We saw pain reported at levels consistent with other papers 😊That lovely Sternberg effect 😀As well as decreased accuracy in older people, suggesting impaired working memory I was as excited as Estonia's entry in Eurovision was excited about an Espresso Macchiato
media.tenor.com
a man in a suit and tie is dancing with two men
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
We thought the ideal task to test both of these hypotheses was the Sternberg Task. ⭐5 levels of difficulty ⭐Response time increases with items in working memory (see fig - look at that lovely line!) ⭐ ideal for testing both limited slots in working memory and arousal hypotheses ⭐
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
High levels of pain + a difficult task = not enough slots in working memory to do the task well But pain is also arousing and performance of cognitive tasks depends on optimum arousal levels - as seen in this gif. Could pain be taking us over optimum arousal levels?
media.tenor.com
a cartoon of a man holding a piece of paper that says ' structural optimum tension ' on it
ALT: a cartoon of a man holding a piece of paper that says ' structural optimum tension ' on it
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
Pain is generally thought to cause deficits in working memory - information that you can recall and manipulate over a short time period. The prevailing hypothesis is that this is through pain taking up slots in working memory - which is limited to 7(ish!) slots
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
Is the pain of null data taking up slots in your working memory? Or shifting you over optimum arousal on the Yerkes Dodson curve? Not for me! I've externalized it to this lovely preprint! Plus, read on for why it might not be the pain that causes deficits in your working memory... 🧵
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 19/05/2025
Poppy, Stella and Noelle 100% agree with this writeup
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Reposted by Caroline Phelps
Tony Pickering @tony-pickering.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
When is a "pathogenic" variant in a classic pain gene (NaV1.7) not pathogenic? When its carried by many thousands of people and has no evidence of a pain phenotype or analgesic prescriptions... We need to reconsider how we assign pathogenicity to these variants. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
medrxiv.org
Carriers of SCN9A variants linked to inherited and acquired pain syndromes show no alteration in the prevalence of pain or analgesic usage in the UK Biobank cohort
The voltage-gated sodium channel NaV1.7, encoded by the SCN9A gene, is integral to nociceptor excitability and pain sensation. Multiple gain-of-function SCN9A variants have been reported to cause auto...
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Reposted by Caroline Phelps
Ian Ballard @iancballard.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
Interested in dopamine? Have fMRI data? We’ve identified a temporal BOLD feature that carries rich information about dopamine physiology. This measure, obtainable from resting-state and task fMRI, opens new ways to indirectly probe dopamine’s role in cognition and disease. 1/n tinyurl.com/bddyz67b
biorxiv.org
Temporal fMRI Dynamics Map Dopamine Physiology
Spatial variations in dopamine function are linked to cognition and substance use disorders but are challenging to characterize with current methods. Because dopamine influences blood vessel dilation,...
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Reposted by Caroline Phelps
Francesca Fardo @francescafardo.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
Excited to share our latest publication, out now in @ScienceAdvances: “Thermosensory predictive coding underpins an illusion of pain.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/.... Read the full thread for details!
science.org
Thermosensory predictive coding underpins an illusion of pain
Computational modeling reveals how uncertainty transforms harmless stimuli into perceptions of pain.
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Reposted by Caroline Phelps
Jonathan Nicholas @jonathannicholas.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
Why do we remember so many details of our experiences even when it is unclear if we will actually ever need them? In a new preprint, @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I asked whether this property is adaptive, because what will be relevant in the future often (usually?!) isn’t apparent.
biorxiv.org
Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision making via access to detailed events
Our experiences contain countless details that may be important in the future, yet we rarely know which will matter and which won't. This uncertainty poses a difficult challenge for adaptive decision ...
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Reposted by Caroline Phelps
Javeria Hashmi @netphys.bsky.social · 04/03/2025
***New paper from our lab*** By Jennika Veinot Low working memory underpins the association between aberrant functional properties of pain modulation circuitry and chronic back pain severity. Journal of PAIN, 2025 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #pain #neuroscience #cognition
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Reposted by Caroline Phelps
Ardem Patapoutian @ardemp.bskyverified.social · 04/03/2025
Can you blind taste and guess Sauvignon Blanc from Riesling? If so, congrats—they’re pretty different! But just know… rats can too. 🐀🍾 h/t @cprofaci.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1...
link.springer.com
Rats can distinguish (and generalize) among two white wine varieties - Animal Cognition
In the olfactory literature there is considerable debate about how differences in olfactory receptors across different species map onto variations in perceptual acuity and performance. Although humans...
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Reposted by Caroline Phelps
Gordon Hodson @gordonhodsonphd.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
Guilty, as charged #AcademicSky #AcademicWriting
ala Great British Baking show, academic sitting on floor staring into oven (parallel to email from editor)
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
This work was completed with lots of wonderful people, particularly the PI, Dr. Horizon Task himself, @doctor-bob.bsky.social as well as all the technicians and undergrads in our big author list.
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
But this comes at the detriment of less random exploration. Which may be why it's harder to teach an old dog new tricks
media.tenor.com
a picture of a dog jumping over a hurdle with the words an attempt was made
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
We found that older adults have a lower signal to noise ratio, which could result in more errors. BUT older adults also had a higher threshold for decision making. Potentially this is a healthy aging adaption which helps to reduce errors, as older adults outperformed younger adults.
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
Older adults use less random exploration, so how does this happen? We focus on the drift diffusion model, where evidence for a decision is noisily accumulated over time, until it passes the threshold for one option or the other.
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
A good way to look at this is sending our participants to a virtual Vegas, playing a choice of two slot machines in the Horizon Task. In which the amount of info they receive about both slot machines varies as well as how long they have to use that info - so how advantageous it is to explore
media.tenor.com
a man is driving a car with the words vegas baby written above him
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
There are two strategies to exploring: * Directed exploration is an explicit bias towards choosing more informative options. * Random exploration- a ‘noisy’ choice selection, where choices are less obviously tied to the value of options.
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
In contrast, exploiting and staying in academia could lead to you publishing exciting preprints, but leave you forever wondering if you could have done well on the Great British Bake Off. The balance between exploring and exploiting shifts towards less exploration in older people
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
We are faced with many 'explore-exploit' decisions throughout our lives. For instance, the eternal postdoc conundrum, do you continue you exploit what you know and continue in academia or explore a new career as a baker? Exploring a career as a baker could lead to a life making beautiful cakes or..
media.tenor.com
a group of people standing around a table with the words started making it had a breakdown bon appetit on the bottom
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
Are you feeling stuck in your ways? Less excited about exploring anything new? You may be aging! Read on for insight into why your decision making is changing.
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Caroline Phelps @carolinephelps.bsky.social · 01/12/2023
Maybe its the same for emeritus professors?!
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