The Pupil Dilation Response to Auditory Stimuli: Current State of Knowledge

Abstract

The measurement of cognitive resource allocation during listening, or listening effort, provides valuable insight in the factors influencing auditory processing. In recent years, many studies inside and outside the field of hearing science have measured the pupil response evoked by auditory stimuli. The aim of the current review was to provide an exhaustive overview of these studies. The 146 studies included in this review originated from multiple domains, including hearing science and linguistics, but the review also covers research into motivation, memory, and emotion. The present review provides a unique overview of these studies and is organized according to the components of the Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening. A summary table presents the sample characteristics, an outline of the study design, stimuli, the pupil parameters analyzed, and the main findings of each study. The results indicate that the pupil response is sensitive to various task manipulations as well as interindividual differences. Many of the findings have been replicated. Frequent interactions between the independent factors affecting the pupil response have been reported, which indicates complex processes underlying cognitive resource allocation. This complexity should be taken into account in future studies that should focus more on interindividual differences, also including older participants. This review facilitates the careful design of new studies by indicating the factors that should be controlled for. In conclusion, measuring the pupil dilation response to auditory stimuli has been demonstrated to be sensitive method applicable to numerous research questions. The sensitivity of the measure calls for carefully designed stimuli.

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

“…The autonomic and central nervous systems also have a complex relationship of reciprocal influence, and the behavior of autonomically controlled end organs has been used to evaluate cognitive effort since at least the 1960s (e.g., Kahneman, ; Kahneman & Beatty, ). Interested readers are referred to reviews by Critchley (), Wright and Kirby (), and Zekveld, Koelewijn, and Kramer ().…”

Pupillometry as an objective measure of sustained attention in young and older listeners

“…Pupil dilation has long been used as a measure of effort (Beatty, 1982;Bradshaw, 1968;Cabestrero et al, 2009;Granholm and Steinhauer, 2004;Hjortkjaer et al, 2018;Wel and Steenbergen, 2018) and is presently attracting considerable interest in the auditory modality because of evidence that pupil dilation can be used as an objective means with which to evaluate challenges to listening (McGarrigle et al, 2014;Peelle, 2018;Pichora-Fuller et al, 2016). The bulk of existing work has used pupillometry to evaluate listening effort associated with degraded speech (Koelewijn et al, 2012(Koelewijn et al, , 2014(Koelewijn et al, , 2015Kuchinsky et al, 2014;Naylor et al, 2018;Ohlenforst et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2017;Wendt et al, 2016Wendt et al, , 2017Winn et al, 2015Winn et al, , 2018Zekveld et al, 2010Zekveld et al, , 2011Zekveld et al, , 2018. As a result, these tasks inherently challenged both the ability to cope with energetic masking and the ability to sustain attention over time.…”

Pupil-associated states modulate excitability but not stimulus selectivity in primary auditory cortex

“…Our work therefore complements 14 human pupillometry's traditional focus on small, rapidly-decaying changes in pupil size that coincide 15 with behavioral events (Kahneman and Beatty, 1966;Beatty, 1982a). The amplitude of these task-16 evoked dilations depends on a variety of cognitive variables (Zekveld et al, 2018). Although the 17 variations in pupil size we observed provide a measurement of physiological arousal, they do not allow 18 us to infer changes in a particular cognitive state, given that they occurred outside a controlled 19 behavior.…”