Attention is in the eye of the beholder: An investigation of the relationship between attentional lapses and pupil size

Attention plays a vital role in helping the brain adaptively disambiguate between relevant and irrelevant information in the environment. Lapses in attention can thus have important negative consequences, varying from small mishaps to life-threatening mistakes and as such it is important to study their mechanisms. Neural entrainment appears to play an important role in attention and researchers have long tried to explore the relationship between the two. Unfortunately, a majority of studies on the topic relies heavily on animal and clinical studies, often using invasive measurement techniques. What is more, some of the non-invasive methods used (such as eye-tracking), sometimes offer contradicting results and lack methodological consensus. The current work is part of a larger study looking at the relationship between attentional lapses and neural entrainment using a multimodal oddball task. Here, we focused solely on eye tracking and set out to investigate whether lapses in...Show moreAttention plays a vital role in helping the brain adaptively disambiguate between relevant and irrelevant information in the environment. Lapses in attention can thus have important negative consequences, varying from small mishaps to life-threatening mistakes and as such it is important to study their mechanisms. Neural entrainment appears to play an important role in attention and researchers have long tried to explore the relationship between the two. Unfortunately, a majority of studies on the topic relies heavily on animal and clinical studies, often using invasive measurement techniques. What is more, some of the non-invasive methods used (such as eye-tracking), sometimes offer contradicting results and lack methodological consensus. The current work is part of a larger study looking at the relationship between attentional lapses and neural entrainment using a multimodal oddball task. Here, we focused solely on eye tracking and set out to investigate whether lapses in attention correspond to changes in tonic pupil size and whether measures of attentional lapses suffer from time-on-task effects. Participants performed an oddball dual-modality task in which they were presented with two simultaneous streams of stimuli (visual and auditory) and had to attend and respond to either visual or auditory targets. We found that the number of false alarms reduced significantly over time and that pupil size showed a decreasing (albeit not significant) trend, while the number of hits did not appear to decrease as time passed. These findings seem to be in partial consensus with previous research on the topic. We also found a significant difference in pupil size between the two attending modalities (attend visual and attend auditory), suggesting that visual and auditory stimuli may influence attention (or at the very least pupil diameter) differently. There was however no difference in any of the behavioral measures based on the attended modality. Similarly, no effect of the pupil size was found for our behavioral measurements, suggesting that An investigation of the relationship between attentional lapses and pupil size 4 pupil size does not necessarily predict behavior. It must be noted however that while our results appear to contradict previous findings from the literature, our sample size is likely too small to draw any generalizable conclusions fromShow less

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Attention is in the eye of the beholder: An investigation of the relationship between attentional lapses and pupil size