Search
Menu
Je me connecte

Institute Of NeuroScience

Search

Institute Of NeuroScience

SpacePain Lab

ions | Bruxelles Woluwe, Louvain-la-Neuve

The ability to perceive pain is crucial for survival, it can indeed be seen as a warning signal allowing to detect and to react against stimuli that have the potential to inflict tissue damages. But pain is also a major healthcare issue as its treatment constitutes a very problematic challenge for physicians. Because of its aversive quality and its high prevalence, chronic pain affects the quality of life of millions of individuals and imposes a severe financial burden upon our societies. Therefore, progress in understanding the biological, psychological and social mechanisms of pain in humans is not only important for basic research, but also critical for the development of effective strategies for the diagnosis and management of pathological pain conditions.

The objective of our group is to study the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the cognitive aspects of pain. Three lines of research are developed. First, the group's researchers seek to understand and describe the cognitive factors that help modulate nociceptive responses and pain perception (e.g. selective attention, executive functions, multisensory interaction, and hypnosis). They also study whether cognitive functions could prevent the development of central sensitization to pain. Second, the group studies how pain and central sensitization induce disrupt cognitive functioning (i.e. attention, memory, body and spatial representation). The third line of research aims to understand how pain interacts with other sensory modalities, such as vision and proprioception, to mentally represent the peripersonal space and to facilitate reaction against potentially damaging stimuli. 

These topics are studied in healthy volunteers on experimentally-induced pain as well as in patients suffering from chronic pain (e.g. complex regional pain syndrome, fibromyalgia). Several techniques are used: neurophysiology (electroencephalography, electrospinography, evoked potentials, electromyography, transcranial magnetic stimulation), psychophysics (threshold measurement, mental chronometry) and neuropsychology (congenital blindness, chronic pain, hemispatial neglect, etc.).

Principal Investigator

PhD students

Scientific Collaborators

  • UCLouvain Laboratory for Experimental Psychopathology (Belgium)
  • Health Psychology Lab, Ghent University (Belgium) 
  • GIGA Consciousness, Université de Liège (Belgium) 
  • Faculté des Sciences de la Motricité, Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium)
  • Integrative, Multisensory, Perception, Action and Cognition Team, Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre (France) 
  • Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Adaptatives, Université de Strasbourg (France) 
  • Department of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf (Germany) 
  • Department of Human Neuroscience, Sapienza University, Rome (Italy)
  • Faculté de Médecine dentaire, Université de Montréal (Canada)
  • The Defensive PeriPersonal Space: multisensory interaction (between pain, vision, proprioception and motor control), spatial perception & body representation 
     
  • Cognitive control of pain (by attention, executive functions, working memory & hypnosis) 
     
  • Cognitive modulation of central sensitization 
     
  • Cognitive modulation of spinal activity to somatosensory stimuli 
     
  • Pathophysiology and prognosis of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome 
     
  • Fibro-Cognition: Assessment of cognitive functions in people with fibromyalgia
  •  
  • Influence of severe alcohol use on pain and its control

1. Johnson A., Bourgy C., Dupuis M., Herbillon G., Vanhaudenhuyse A., Rainville P., Watremez C., Legrain V. (2026). Investigating pain perception under focused hypnotic analgesia: Local and remote effects. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, in press.

2. Louis M.H., Legrain V., Aron V., Filbrich L., Mouraux A., Henrard S., Guillaume L., Mouraux D., Barbier O., Libouton X., Berquin A. (2026). Complex regional pain syndrome evolution is determined by both biological and psychosocial factors – a 1-year prospective observational study. Pain, 167:396-431.

3. Della Porta D., Scheirman E., Legrain V. (2024). Top-down attention does not modulate mechanical hypersensitivity consecutive to central sensitization: Insights from an experimental analysis. Pain, 165:2098-2110.

4. Filbrich L., Kuzminova A., Molitor V., Mouraux D., Berquin A., Barbier O., Libouton X., Legrain V. (2023). Characterizing visuospatial perceptual biases in Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. European Journal of Pain, 27:871-883.

5. Legrain V., Filbrich L., Vanderclausen C. (2023). Letter on the pain of the Blind for the use of those who can see their pain. Pain, 164:1451-1456. 

Publications