Separating Components of Attention and Surprise

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that neural components of attention and surprise can be reliably detected through pupil dilation measurements, even with low-cost eye tracking in everyday settings, advancing understanding of arousal-linked cognitive processes.

Contribution

It extends previous research by showing that attention and surprise signatures are robust and detectable via simple eye tracking, separating neural components in real-world contexts.

Findings

Attention components are detectable with low-cost eye tracking.

Surprise reactions can be identified through pupil dilation.

Signatures of attention and surprise are robust across tasks.

Abstract

Cognitive processes involved in both allocation of attention during decision making as well as surprise when making mistakes trigger release of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which has been shown to be correlated with an increase in pupil dilation, in turn reflecting raised levels of arousal. Extending earlier experiments based on the Attention Network Test (ANT), separating the neural components of alertness and spatial re-orientation from the attention involved in more demanding conflict resolution tasks, we demonstrate that these signatures of attention are so robust that they may be retrieved even when applying low cost eye tracking in an everyday mobile computing context. Furthermore we find that the reaction of surprise elicited when committing mistakes in a decision task, which in the neuroimaging EEG literature have been referred to as a negativity feedback error correction signal, may likewise be retrieved solely based on an increase in pupil dilation.