Does Cognitive Workload Impact the Effect on Pain Distraction in Virtual Reality? A Study Design

Pain is an important issue for post-surgery patients. Virtual reality treatment (VRT) has been used to reduce pain perception, while there arc few studies have investigated the effect of cognitive workload (CWL). The present study design hypothesizes that higher CWL will lead to stronger distraction in a virtual environment. To this end, a soothing psychological relief environment with a cognitive task, in which participants' CWL can he controlled, is constructed. In the future, this study will be applied to patients with pain to explore whether CWL is one of the key factors in reducing pain in VRT.