Infant and adult pupil dilation in response to unexpected sounds

Abstract

Surprisingly occurring sounds outside the focus of attention can involuntarily capture attention. This study focuses on the impact of deviant sounds on the pupil size as a marker of auditory involuntary attention in infants. We presented an oddball paradigm including four types of deviant sounds within a sequence of repeated standard sounds to 14-month-old infants and to adults. Environmental and noise deviant sounds elicited a strong pupil dilation response (PDR) in both age groups. In contrast, moderate frequency deviants elicited a significant PDR in adults only. Moreover, a principal component analysis revealed two components underlying the PDR. Component scores differ, depending on deviant types, between age groups. Results indicate age effects of parasympathetic inhibition and sympathetic activation of the pupil size caused by deviant sounds with a high arousing potential. Results demonstrate that the PDR is a sensitive tool for the investigation of involuntary attention to sounds in preverbal children.

Distraction by Novel and Pitch-Deviant Sounds in Children

“…Environmental sounds have a complex structure since they contain a variety of frequencies, whereas pitch-deviant sounds contain only a single frequency. Even infants processed physically complex oddball sounds (e.g., bursts of noise) differently from pitch-deviant sounds (Wetzel et al, 2016). In their auditory-visual oddball study, the distractor-related pupil dilation response was clearly increased in response to noise oddball sounds (that included a variety of frequencies), whereas no response was observed in response to pitch-deviant sine wave sounds (included a single frequency).…”

“…It has been reported that the sound of the one's own smartphone captures more attention than the sounds of other smartphones when presented in an oddball paradigm to adults (Roye et al, 2007). Even infants responded to oddball sounds, that provided an emotional meaning (e.g., the cry of a peer), with increased pupil dilation than in response to a phone ring which had a similar complexity but a probably less significant meaning (Wetzel et al, 2016). Semantic information therefore might increase the personal significance of novel sounds contributing to differences between the conditions.…”

Listening effort: Are we measuring cognition or affect, or both?

“…Pupil dilation is governed both sympathetically and parasympathetically (Steinhauer, Siegle, Condray, & Pless, 2004), with parasympathetic arousal causing constriction and sympathetic arousal causing dilation. Although this means that a dilatory response may result from either arousal of the SNS or inhibition of the PNS (Bradley, Sapigao, & Lang, 2017), due to the slightly different time scales on which these two systems may operate, these contributions may be dissociable in the pupillary response signal through statistical means (Wetzel, Buttelmann, Schieler, & Widmann, 2016;Widmann, Schröger, & Wetzel, 2017). Although the following hypothesis is still highly speculative at the moment, we suggest that this may be significant because, although both cognitive and affective (emotional) stimulation may result in pupil dilation, emotionally evocative stimuli appear to cause pupil dilation primarily through sympathetic arousal (Bradley et al, 2017), while cognitive demand induces primarily parasympathetic withdrawal (Steinhauer et al, 2004).…”

Can't Ignore—Distraction by Task‐Irrelevant Sounds in Early and Middle Childhood

“…These research questions might be answered using neurophysiological and psychophysiological approaches. For example, a recent study demonstrated that pupillometry can be used to study distractor processing in preverbal children (Wetzel, Buttelmann, Schieler, & Widmann, 2016).…”