Pupil Size as Related to Interest Value of Visual Stimuli

Abstract

Increases in the size of the pupil of the eye have been found to accompany the viewing of emotionally toned or interesting visual stimuli. A technique for recording such changes has been developed, and preliminary results with cats and human beings are reported with attention being given to differences between the sexes in response to particular types of material.

The developing cognitive substrate of sequential action control in 9- to 12-month-olds: Evidence for concurrent activation models

“…Hess & Polt, 1960), cognitive load (Kahneman & Beatty, 1966), and mental effort (Kahneman, 1973;Hess & Polt, Sequential action representation in infancy 15 1964). Whatever the exact interpretation of the measure, using it enables us to contrast acquisition contingent vs. non-contingent responses since all interpretations suggested that dilations should be larger for actions that require more processing (Verschoor et al, in press).…”

Male bisexual arousal: A matter of curiosity?

“…For these reasons, pupil dilation has been used as an indicator of automatic responses, including responses reflecting sexual arousal (Goldinger & Papesh, 2012;Laeng, Sirois, & Gredebäck, 2012). Pupils dilate more to sexual stimuli depicting an individual's preferred sex than to stimuli of the other sex or to non-sexual stimuli (Hess & Polt, 1960;Hess, Seltzer, & Shlien, 1965;. In fact, dilation to sexually preferred stimuli appears to be the strongest pupillary response elicited by stimuli (Laeng et al, 2012).…”

A Review of Pupillometry for Human-computer Interaction Studies

“…The most widely cited, earliest studies using pupillometry were conducted by Hess and Polt [1][2]. They have reported that when people view stimuli that is interesting, confusing or contains emotional tones, their pupils will dilate more compared to visually similar, but otherwise neutral stimuli.…”

“…This can be done by simply subtracting the average value for each participant from all data points [40], performing a z-transformation [30] or providing the percentage of change compared to a baseline value [1]. This latter practice is prone to producing misleading results because it is greatly influenced by the chosen baseline value [41] and should be avoided.…”