Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 109, Issue 22, Pages 8456-8460Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1201858109
Keywords
attentional blink; cognitive load
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Funding
- Behavioural and Cognitive Neurosciences Research School of the University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen
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The size of the human pupil increases as a function of mental effort. However, this response is slow, and therefore its use is thought to be limited to measurements of slow tasks or tasks in which meaningful events are temporally well separated. Here we show that high-temporal-resolution tracking of attention and cognitive processes can be obtained from the slow pupillary response. Using automated dilation deconvolution, we isolated and tracked the dynamics of attention in a fast-paced temporal attention task, allowing us to uncover the amount of mental activity that is critical for conscious perception of relevant stimuli. We thus found evidence for specific temporal expectancy effects in attention that have eluded detection using neuroimaging methods such as EEG. Combining this approach with other neuroimaging techniques can open many research opportunities to study the temporal dynamics of the mind's inner eye in great detail.
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