I spy with my little eye: Detection of temporal violations in event sequences and the pupillary response

The role of temporal properties on the detection of temporal violations: insights from pupillometry

“…However, the increase is significantly greater when task demands are high compared to when task demands are low. This is the case when a stimulus is unexpected (Gilzenrat Sit down at Brown et al 1999;Siegle et al 2008) or-as we have shown before-when events violate the temporal order (Raisig et al 2007(Raisig et al , 2010. In this task, when a temporal violation is anticipated, we expect that it is not accompanied by the typical pupillary response that marks increased cognitive effort and resource consumption.…”

“…We addressed this question with the triplet-paradigm that we have used in several other studies (Raisig et al 2007(Raisig et al , 2010. In that paradigm, an activity (e.g., going to a restaurant) is presented to activate the component events in long-term memory and produce predictions about the order the events will unfold in.…”

The social pain of Cyberball: Decreased pupillary reactivity to exclusion cues

“…For example, the pupil unilaterally dilates in response to task error and incongruent trials during the Stroop task (Brown et al, 1999;Critchley, Tang, Glaser, Butterworth, & Dolan, 2005;Laeng, Ørbo, Holmlund, & Miozzo, 2011). Similarly, the pupil also responds to violations of expectations (Preuschoff, 't Hart, & Einhäuser, 2011;Raisig, Welke, Hagendorf, & van der Meer, 2010;Raisig, Hagendorf, & van der Meer, 2011;Sleegers, Proulx, & Van Beest, 2015). Sleegers et al (2015) have shown, for example, that repeated presentations of reverse-colored playing cards (e.g., black two of hearts) lead to a sustained and consistent increase in pupil dilation across dozens of trials.…”

“…If the initial response to cues of ostracism is indeed primarily a violation of expectations, we should see an increase in pupil dilation in response to these cues. This is based on the research showing the pupil unilaterally dilates following cognitive conflict induced by a variety of expectancy violations, such as task error and perceptual discrepancies (e.g., Brown et al, 1999;Critchley et al, 2005;Preuschoff et al, 2011;Raisig et al, 2010;Raisig et al, 2011;Sleegers et al, 2015). Since it takes some time to realize one is being excluded during a game of Cyberball, we can additionally predict that this increase in pupil dilation appears gradually, once it is clear that each ball toss not received is indeed a signal of being ostracized.…”

Open your eyes for prediction errors

“…For example, failing at walking down the stairs (unexpected failure in a simple task) or hitting the bull's eye in darts (unexpected success in a hard task) can also result in prediction errors (i.e., performance prediction errors). In the present study, we tested this hypothesis by investigating the interaction between task difficulty and task performance on pupil dilation-as a measure of cognitive surprise (e.g., Nassar et al, 2012;Preuschoff, 't Hart, & Einhäuser, 2011;Raisig, Welke, Hagendorf, & van der Meer, 2010;Silvetti, Seurinck, van Bochove, & Verguts, 2013).…”