Pupil Size in Relation to Mental Activity during Simple Problem-Solving

Hess, Eckhard H.; Polt, James M.

doi:10.1126/science.143.3611.1190

Cited by 926 publications

(676 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Therefore, it is not surprising that participants preferentially attended to cues that selectively supported the only reliable navigation strategy available. Furthermore, pupil size differences between the visible and invisible platform trials in the study by Mueller et al (2008) could be attributed to task difficulty (Hess & Polt, 1964), rather than the respective cognitive demands of place and response navigation. In addition, only the ocular behavior at the beginning of each test trial is analysed in these studies, and not the entire spatial decision making process.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Human place and response learning: navigation strategy selection, pupil size and gaze behavior

Condappa

Wiener

2014

Psychological Research

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In this study, we examined the cognitive processes and ocular behavior associated with on-going navigation strategy choice using a route learning paradigm that distinguishes between three different wayfinding strategies: an allocentric place strategy, and the egocentric associative cue and beacon response strategies. Participants approached intersections of a known route from a variety of directions, and were asked to indicate the direction in which the original route continued. Their responses in a subset of these test trials allowed the assessment of strategy choice over the course of six experimental blocks. The behavioral data revealed an initial maladaptive bias for a beacon response strategy, with shifts in favour of the optimal configuration place strategy occurring over the course of the experiment. Response time analysis suggests that the configuration strategy relied on spatial transformations applied to a viewpoint-dependent spatial representation, rather than direct access to an allocentric representation. Furthermore, pupillary measures reflected the employment of place and response strategies throughout the experiment, with increasing use of the more cognitively demanding configuration strategy associated with increases in pupil dilation. During test trials in which known intersections were approached from different directions, visual attention was directed to the landmark encoded during learning as well as the intended movement direction. Interestingly, the encoded landmark did not differ between the three navigation strategies, which is discussed in the context of initial strategy choice and the parallel acquisition of place and response knowledge.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Human place and response learning: navigation strategy selection, pupil size and gaze behavior

Condappa

Wiener

2014

Psychological Research

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“…In addition to the pupillary light reflex, research spanning almost fifty years has established increased pupillary dilation (PD) as a correlate of diverse cognitive demands, including mental arithmetic (Hess & Polt, 1964), working memory (Kahneman & Beatty, 1966), and decisionmaking spanning perceptual (Kahneman & Beatty, 1967), semantic (Ahern & Beatty, 1981) and economic domains (Fiedler & Glockner, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pupil dilation during recognition memory: Isolating unexpected recognition from judgment uncertainty

2016

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Optimally discriminating familiar from novel stimuli demands a decision-making process informed by prior expectations. Here we demonstrate that pupillary dilation (PD) responses during recognition memory decisions are modulated by expectations, and more specifically, that pupil dilation increases for unexpected compared to expected recognition. Furthermore, multi-level modeling demonstrated that the time course of the dilation during each individual trial contains separable early and late dilation components, with the early amplitude capturing unexpected recognition, and the later trailing slope reflecting general judgment uncertainty or effort. This is the first demonstration that the early dilation response during recognition is dependent upon observer expectations and that separate recognition expectation and judgment uncertainty components are present in the dilation time course of every trial. The findings provide novel insights into adaptive memory-linked orienting mechanisms as well as the general cognitive underpinnings of the pupillary index of autonomic nervous system activity.

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“…The involuntary reaction of the pupil to changes in task conditions is also called the task-evoked pupillary response (TEPR ;Beatty, 1982). In the past, TEPRs were obtained at 1-2 Hz by motion picture photography (Hess & Polt, 1964). This required researchers to measure the pupil diameter manually frame by frame (Janisse, 1977).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Typically, the dilation was found to be higher for more challenging tasks (Ahern, 1978;Kahneman & Beatty, 1966), including mental arithmetic tasks (Boersma et al, 1970;Bradshaw, 1968;Hess & Polt, 1964;Schaefer et al, 1968). Not only task demands have been found to influence the pupil diameter, but also factors like anxiety, stress, and fatigue.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Workload assessment for mental arithmetic tasks using the task-evoked pupillary response

Marquart

Winter

2015

PeerJ Computer Science

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Pupillometry is a promising method for assessing mental workload and could be helpful in the optimization of systems that involve human-computer interaction. The present study focuses on replicating the studies by Ahern (1978) and Klingner (2010), which found that for three levels of difficulty of mental multiplications, the more difficult multiplications yielded larger dilations of the pupil. Using a remote eye tracker, our research expands upon these two previous studies by statistically testing for each 1.5 s interval of the calculation period (1) the mean absolute pupil diameter (MPD), (2) the mean pupil diameter change (MPDC) with respect to the pupil diameter during the pre-stimulus accommodation period, and (3) the mean pupil diameter change rate (MPDCR). An additional novelty of our research is that we compared the pupil diameter measures with a self-report measure of workload, the NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX), and with the mean blink rate (MBR). The results showed that the findings of Ahern and Klingner were replicated, and that the MPD and MPDC discriminated just as well between the lowest and highest difficulty levels as did the NASA-TLX. The MBR, on the other hand, did not differentiate between the difficulty levels. Moderate to strong correlations were found between the MPDC and the proportion of incorrect responses, indicating that the MPDC was higher for participants with a poorer performance. For practical applications, validity could be improved by combining pupillometry with other physiological techniques.

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Pupil Size in Relation to Mental Activity during Simple Problem-Solving

Cited by 926 publications

References 3 publications

Human place and response learning: navigation strategy selection, pupil size and gaze behavior

Human place and response learning: navigation strategy selection, pupil size and gaze behavior

Pupil dilation during recognition memory: Isolating unexpected recognition from judgment uncertainty

Workload assessment for mental arithmetic tasks using the task-evoked pupillary response

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