ArticleHuman brain mapping2014
Pupil diameter covaries with BOLD activity in human locus coeruleus.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT07402356 (Task-evoked Pupillometry in AD, MCI, and Depression-Related Cognitive Impairment), which is not on this map. Cited by 415 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.
The trial behind it
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.
Task-evoked Pupillometry in AD, MCI, and Depression-Related Cognitive Impairment
Who cites it
415 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 860 citations in OpenAlex.
- Look into my eyes: What can eye-based measures tell us about the relationship between physical activity and cognitive performance?Journal of sport and health science · 2023Pooled it
- Cardiovascular Responses to Natural and Auditory Evoked Slow Waves Predict Post-Sleep Cardiac Function.Journal of sleep research · 2026Trial
- Blue enriched light modulates pupil dilation induced by transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Subanesthetic Ketamine Suppresses Locus Coeruleus-Mediated Alertness Effects: A 7T fMRI Study.The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Trial
- Improvement of mnemonic discrimination with acute light exercise is mediated by pupil-linked arousal in healthy older adults.Neurobiology of aging · 2024Trial
- The catecholamine precursor Tyrosine reduces autonomic arousal and decreases decision thresholds in reinforcement learning and temporal discounting.PLoS computational biology · 2022Trial
- Effort Mobilization and Lapses of Sustained Attention.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Trial
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- Lapses of attention.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Beyond vigilance: A dual-process perspective on visual sustained attention.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Cognitive reappraisal influences the organization of emotional episodes in memory.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Nurses' Visual Attention During Initial Observation of Patients With Suspected Pneumonia: An Observational Pupillometry Study.Japan journal of nursing science : JJNS · 2026Observational
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- Article
- Candidate Right Locus Coeruleus-Centered Symptom Pathways in Young Major Depressive Disorder: A Multimodal Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Modality-general sensitivity of pupil responses to regularity violations.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- eyeris: A Flexible, Extensible, and Reproducible Pupillometry Preprocessing Framework in R.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Pupil size is linked to opposite signal fluctuations between cortical BOLD and ventricular CSF.NeuroImage · 2026Article
- Arousal state modulates human hippocampal ripples.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Noradrenergic infraslow rhythm during sleep is the critical link between heart-rate dynamics and memory consolidation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
355 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
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The locus coeruleus-noradrenergic (LC-NA) neuromodulatory system has been implicated in a broad array of cognitive processes, yet scope for investigating this system's function in humans is currently limited by an absence of reliable non-invasive measures of LC activity. Although pupil diameter has been employed as a proxy measure of LC activity in numerous studies, empirical evidence for a relationship between the two is lacking. In the present study, we sought to rigorously probe the relationship between pupil diameter and BOLD activity localized to the human LC. Simultaneous pupillometry and fMRI revealed a relationship between continuous pupil diameter and BOLD activity in a dorsal pontine cluster overlapping with the LC, as localized via neuromelanin-sensitive structural imaging and an LC atlas. This relationship was present both at rest and during performance of a two-stimulus oddball task, with and without spatial smoothing of the fMRI data, and survived retrospective image correction for physiological noise. Furthermore, the spatial extent of this pupil/LC relationship guided a volume-of-interest analysis in which we provide the first demonstration in humans of a fundamental characteristic of animal LC activity: phasic modulation by oddball stimulus relevance. Taken together, these findings highlight the potential for utilizing pupil diameter to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the role of the LC-NA system in human cognition.
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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.