Association between pupil dilation and implicit processing prior to object recognition via insight

Abstract

Insight refers to the sudden conscious shift in the perception of a situation following a period of unconscious processing. The present study aimed to investigate the implicit neural mechanisms underlying insight-based recognition, and to determine the association between these mechanisms and the extent of pupil dilation. Participants were presented with ambiguous, transforming images comprised of dots, following which they were asked to state whether they recognized the object and their level of confidence in this statement. Changes in pupil dilation were not only characterized by the recognition state into the ambiguous object but were also associated with prior awareness of object recognition, regardless of meta-cognitive confidence. Our findings indicate that pupil dilation may represent the level of implicit integration between memory and visual processing, despite the lack of object awareness, and that this association may involve noradrenergic activity within the locus coeruleus-noradrenergic (LC-NA) system.

Individual pupil size changes as a robust indicator of cognitive familiarity differences

“…This approach also circumvented the allocation of attention to specific aspects of the presented product images other than the information the consumer is naturally drawn towards. Hence, we consider observing a robust larger increase in pupil dilation during passive viewing of familiar product images, in line with the well-documented old/new response (Võ et al, 2008) and successful object recognition (Kafkas & Montaldi, 2011Otero et al, 2011;Suzuki et al, 2018), a key advantage of and support for the sensitivity of the presented paradigm. If successful recognition of a familiar product occurred in this task, it was implicit and did not require the recall of contextual information.…”

“…3a). Evidence of temporal differences in the recognition of slowly emerging grey-scaled objects without explicit memory demands can provide useful insights (Suzuki et al, 2018). This research found larger pupil dilation for recognized objects starting around 600 ms post-stimulus onset that lasted until the end of the stimulus presentation (1.5 seconds).…”

“…Previous studies investigating pupil responses as a function of familiarity, the old/new effect, and object recognition have predominantly used grey-scaled images, movies or words (Beukema et al, 2019;Bradley & Lang, 2015;Kafkas & Montaldi, 2015;Kucewicz et al, 2018;Otero et al, 2011;Suzuki et al, 2018)-with few utilizing sounds (Jagiello et al, 2019;Swallow et al, 2019). Two other studies have used largely varying colourful real world scenes (Naber et al, 2013).…”

“…These changes in pupil size are involuntary and automatic (Laeng et al, 2012), and have been demonstrated to vary due to implicit cognitive processes. These processes include cognitive load, cognitive arousal, attention (Bradley et al, 2008;Daniels et al, 2012;DiCriscio et al, 2018;Joshi & Gold, 2020;Kahneman & Beatty, 1966;Koelewijn et al, 2015;Sirois & Brisson, 2014), object recognition (Suzuki et al, 2018), memory retrieval 3 Kafkas & Montaldi, 2011;Kucewicz et al, 2018;Otero et al, 2011), and novelty (Kafkas & Montaldi, 2015;Naber et al, 2013;Sirois & Brisson, 2014).…”

Asymmetrical characteristics of emotional responses to pictures and sounds: Evidence from pupillometry

“…The baseline pupil size was computed as an average of the data collected prior to the stimulus onset (picture or sound presentation), from -200 ms to 0 ms (presentation onset). The baseline-corrected average pupil sizes for the presentation period of 0 ms to 5,800 ms in both experiments were compared to each condition [38].…”