Pupil diameter encodes the idiosyncratic, cognitive complexity of belief updating.

ABSTRACT: Pupils tend to dilate in response to surprising events, but it is not known whether these responses are primarily stimulus driven or instead reflect a more nuanced relationship between pupil-linked arousal systems and cognitive expectations. Using an auditory adaptive decision-making task, we show that evoked pupil diameter is more parsimoniously described as signaling violations of learned, top-down expectations than changes in low-level stimulus properties. We further show that both baseline and evoked pupil diameter is modulated by the degree to which individual subjects use these violations to update their subsequent expectations, as reflected in the complexity of their updating strategy. Together these results demonstrate a central role for idiosyncratic cognitive processing in how ar

SUBMITTER: Filipowicz AL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7289603 | biostudies-literature | 2020 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature