Using task effort and pupil size to track covert shifts of visual attention independently of a pupillary light reflex
| Autor: | Stefanie Hüttermann, Tim Graf, Daniel Memmert, Raphael Harbecke, Andreas Brocher |
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| Rok vydání: | 2018 |
| Předmět: |
Adult
Male Attentional shift medicine.medical_specialty genetic structures Physical Exertion Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Fixation Ocular Audiology Reflex Pupillary Luminance 050105 experimental psychology Pupil Young Adult 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) Developmental and Educational Psychology medicine Humans Visual attention Attention 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Pupillary light reflex General Psychology 05 social sciences eye diseases Covert Peripheral vision Visual Perception Female sense organs Psychology (miscellaneous) Psychology Photic Stimulation 030217 neurology & neurosurgery Pupillometry |
| Zdroj: | Behavior Research Methods. 50:2551-2567 |
| ISSN: | 1554-3528 |
| Popis: | We tested the link between pupil size and the task effort involved in covert shifts of visual attention. The goal of this study was to establish pupil size as a marker of attentional shifting in the absence of luminance manipulations. In three experiments, participants evaluated two stimuli that were presented peripherally, appearing equidistant from and on opposite sides of eye fixation. The angle between eye fixation and the peripherally presented target stimuli varied from 12.5° to 42.5°. The evaluation of more distant stimuli led to poorer performance than did the evaluation of more proximal stimuli throughout our study, confirming that the former required more effort than the latter. In addition, in Experiment 1 we found that pupil size increased with increasing angle and that this effect could not be reduced to the operation of low-level visual processes in the task. In Experiment 2 the pupil dilated more strongly overall when participants evaluated the target stimuli, which required shifts of attention, than when they merely reported on the target's presence versus absence. Both conditions yielded larger pupils for more distant than for more proximal stimuli, however. In Experiment 3, we manipulated task difficulty more directly, by changing the contrast at which the target stimuli were presented. We replicated the results from Experiment 1 only with the high-contrast stimuli. With stimuli of low contrast, ceiling effects in pupil size were observed. Our data show that the link between task effort and pupil size can be used to track the degree to which an observer covertly shifts attention to or detects stimuli in peripheral vision. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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