Abstract
The muscles that control the pupil are richly innervated by the autonomic nervous system. While there are central pathways that drive pupil dilations in relation to arousal, there is no anatomical evidence that cortical centers involved with visual selective attention innervate the pupil. In this study, we show that such connections must exist. Specifically, we demonstrate a novel Pupil Frequency Tagging (PFT) method, where oscillatory changes in stimulus brightness over time are mirrored by pupil constrictions and dilations. We find that the luminance–induced pupil oscillations are enhanced when covert attention is directed to the flicker stimulus and when targets are correctly detected in an attentional tracking task. These results suggest that the amplitudes of pupil responses closely follow the allocation of focal visual attention and the encoding of stimuli. PFT provides a new opportunity to study top–down visual attention itself as well as identifying the pathways and mechanisms that support this unexpected phenomenon.
Highlights
Paying attention to items and events outside ones central gaze is a key cognitive skill (James, 1890; Posner, 1980)
As the area of the flickering disk was much smaller than the quadrants in Experiment 2, we first determined whether the disk could induce coherent pupil oscillations (Figure 3B)
Could we determine the amount of attention allocated to the stimulus from the pupil oscillations and predict whether observers would detect or miss a particular target? To address this, we examined how the amplitude of pupil oscillations developed during correct target detection as compared to target misses
Summary
Paying attention to items and events outside ones central gaze is a key cognitive skill (James, 1890; Posner, 1980). There can be parts of the visual scene that receive focused attention and parts that receive none or fewer attentional resources. The perception of the latter is extremely limited (Rensink et al, 1997; Mack and Rock, 1998; Most et al, 2005; Cohen et al, 2011) and attentional slips sometimes lead to undesirable events such as accidents (Reason, 1990). As attentional competition and capacity limitations can have serious repercussions for everyday life, it is important to investigate their underlying mechanisms
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