When does an easy task become hard? A systematic review of human task-evoked pupillary dynamics versus cognitive efforts

Abstract

The amount of working memory recourses available (or required) to process a cognitive task (easy or hard) represents human cognitive effort. Working memory resources (visual or auditory) and cognitive efforts are interconnected with visual or auditory pathways. In this review, various facets of pupillary dynamics literature are compared in order to determine an optimal method of cognitive effort assessment. Some key categorical areas of interest are identified including the presented stimulus, observed response, comparisons and different methods of analysis. In details review, a set of predetermined evaluation criteria were used and a decision matrix is developed to outline the best practice in papillary dynamics. Based on the summery table in the form of the decision matrix, a quantitative model with artificial neural network (ANN) is selected for a best practice of cognitive effort estimation. The mental multiplication task is found an effective stimulus (cognitive task) to evoke the pupillary response for various level of task difficulty. In most cases, aural and visual are considered as two presentation modes, two sensory inputs, and two mental resources and greatly imparts in cognitive workload. Through this review, it is also explored that, linking together by transfer and error functions, a combination of an ANN and a multinomial processing tree can used in cognitive effort analysis. This research direction can further explored to estimate the relationship between cognitive task and cognitive effort, to facilitate in technology development for neurological disorders, such as narcolepsy, on the neural pathways involved in cognitive processing.