Is pupillary response a reliable index of word recognition? Evidence from a delayed lexical decision task

Abstract

Previous word recognition studies have shown that the pupillary response is sensitive to a word's frequency. However, such a pupillary effect may be due to the process of executing a response, instead of being an index of word processing. With the aim of exploring this possibility, we recorded the pupillary responses in two experiments involving a lexical decision task (LDT). In the first experiment, participants completed a standard LDT, whereas in the second they performed a delayed LDT. The delay in the response allowed us to compare pupil dilations with and without the response execution component. The results showed that pupillary response was modulated by word frequency in both the standard and the delayed LDT. This finding supports the reliability of using pupillometry for word recognition research. Importantly, our results also suggest that tasks that do not require a response during pupil recording lead to clearer and stronger effects.Keywords Visual word recognition . Pupillometry . Lexical decision task . Delayed lexical decision task . Word frequency effect

A valence asymmetry in predecisional distortion of information: Evidence from an eye tracking study with incentivized choices.

“…First, there is a question of whether the pupil can respond to the sentiment of a word before the gaze is transferred to the next one. Classic studies reported pupil latencies under 300 ms in cognitive tasks (Ahern & Beatty, 1979), whereas recent experiments in reading and lexical decision tasks demonstrated that the peak pupil latency can be significantly higher (note, however, that this may be due to the need to execute a response after each word, unlike in our study; see, e.g., Haro, Guasch, Vallès, & Ferré, 2017). On the one hand, approximately half of the looking durations that we registered were below 300 ms. On the other hand, it appears that the number of long fixations was sufficiently large to allow for significant pupil dilation results despite the noise brought about by the uninformative short fixations.…”

Contextual Acquisition of Concrete and Abstract Words: Behavioural and Electrophysiological Evidence

“…The items were presented for 600 ms, with a crosshair (“+”) in the interstimulus interval (1400 ms), in random order. This is a slight modification of a standard lexical decision task, which typically contrasts existing words with unknown pseudowords (e.g., [ 40 , 41 ]), whereas here we used newly learned words as critical stimuli. In the free-form definition task, participants were presented with 20 newly learnt words that they had to define by typing their definitions into the spreadsheet.…”

Contrast Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Infelicitous Beat Gesture Increases Cognitive Load During Online Spoken Discourse Comprehension

“…Research examining the task‐evoked pupillary response (TEPR) provides evidence that the relationship between pitch accenting and referent status affects comprehenders' cognitive load during spoken discourse processing. Generally, smaller pupillary responses are observed when language processing is facilitated by intrinsic characteristics of the linguistic input such as speech quality (Koch & Janse, 2016; Kuchinsky et al, 2013; McGarrigle, Dawes, Stewart, Kuchinsky, & Munro, 2017; Tamási, McKean, Gafos, Fritzsche, & Höhle, 2017; Wagner, Toffanin, & Başkent, 2016; Winn, Edwards, & Litovsky, 2015; Zekveld, Kramer, & Festen, 2010), lexical characteristics (Chapman & Hallowell, 2015; Frank & Thompson, 2012; Geller, Landrigan, & Mirman, 2019; Geller, Still, & Morris, 2016; Guasch, Ferre, & Haro, 2017; Haro, Guasch, Vallès, & Ferré, 2017; Hyönä, Tommola, & Alaja, 1995; Kuchinke, Võ, Hofmann, & Jacobs, 2007; Ledoux et al, 2016; Lõo, van Rij, Järvikivi, & Baayen, 2016; Papesh & Goldinger, 2012), lack of syntactic ambiguity (Ben‐Nun, 1986; Just & Carpenter, 1993; Nikuni, Yasunaga, Iwasaki, & Muramoto, 2015; Sauppe, 2017; Schluroff, 1982; Sevilla, Maldonado, & Shalóm, 2014), and discursive implications (Demberg & Sayeed, 2016; Tromp, Hagoort, & Meyer, 2016). Conversely, larger pupillary responses are observed when language must be comprehended while simultaneously performing other tasks (Causse, Peysakhovich, & Fabre, 2016; Demberg & Sayeed, 2016; Koelewijn, de Kluiver, Shinn‐Cunningham, Zekveld, & Kramer, 2015; Koelewijn, Shinn‐Cunningham, Zekveld, & Kramer, 2014; Kramer et al, 2013) as well when language comprehension is difficult due to conditions such as aphasia and cognitive aging (Chapman & Hallowell, 2015; Hochmann & Papeo, 2014; Koch & Janse, 2016; Piquado, Isaacowitz, & Wingfield, 2010; Schmidtke, 2014; Wendt, Dau, & Hjortkjær, 2016; see Schmidtke, 2018, for a review), indicating that task‐external factors also affect pupillary responses during language comprehens...…”