ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Bright illusions reduce the eye's pupil.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 75 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
75 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 190 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pupil Reactions to Tactile Stimulation: A Systematic Review.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- Task-dependent pupillary responses to glossiness and attractiveness judgments.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Article
- Illusory cold desensitizes touch.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Pupillometric evidence for perceptual simulation in language comprehension: Sensory and emotional meanings of Japanese adjectives.Perception · 2026Article
- Pupillary responses to the glare illusion in normal pressure hydrocephalus: insights into network dysfunction and neurodegenerative comorbidities.Neurological sciences : official journal of the Italian Neurological Society and of the Italian Society of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2026Article
- Estimation method of attentional object using spatial frequency selectivity in pupillary response.PloS one · 2026Article
- Eye metrics often reflect visual conscious awareness, conscious content, and neural processing in cerebral blindness.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Pupil size tracks attentional breadth in the Navon task.Perception · 2025Article
- Too Bright to Focus? Influence of Brightness Illusions and Ambient Light Levels on the Dynamics of Ocular Accommodation.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The glare illusion in individuals with schizophrenia.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2025Article
- No evidence for a cortical origin of pupil constriction responses to isoluminant stimuli.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Sleuthing subjectivity: a review of covert measures of consciousness.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Pupil adjustments to illusory perceptions of the light intensity of object surfaces.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Pattern-induced visual discomfort and its cumulative effects revealed by pupillary measures.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Article
- Illusory light drives pupil responses in primates.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Brightness illusions drive a neuronal response in the primary visual cortex under top-down modulation.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Adaptation to numerosity affects the pupillary light response.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Comparative Assessment of Physiological Responses to Emotional Elicitation by Auditory and Visual Stimuli.IEEE journal of translational engineering in health and medicine · 2024Article
15 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We recorded by use of an infrared eye-tracker the pupil diameters of participants while they observed visual illusions of lightness or brightness. Four original illusions {based on Gaetano Kanisza's [Kanizsa G (1976) Subjective contours. Sci Am 234:48-52] and Akiyoshi Kitaoka's [Kitaoka A. (2005) Trick Eyes (Barnes & Noble, New Providence, NJ).] examples} were manipulated to obtain control conditions in which the perceived illusory luminance was either eliminated or reduced. All stimuli were equiluminant so that constrictions in pupillary size could not be ascribed to changes in light energy. We found that the pupillary diameter rapidly varied according to perceived brightness and lightness strength. Differences in local contrast information could be ruled out as an explanation because, in a second experiment, the observers maintained eye fixation in the center of the display; thus, differential stimulation of the fovea by local contrast changes could not be responsible for the pupillary differences. Hence, the most parsimonious explanation for the present findings is that pupillary responses to ambient light reflect the perceived brightness or lightness of the scene and not simply the amount of physical light energy entering the eye. Thus, the pupillary physiological response reflects the subjective perception of light and supports the idea that the brain's visual circuitry is shaped by visual experience with images and their possible sources.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.