ArticleFrontiers in behavioral neuroscience2014
Pupil size variations correlate with physical effort perception.
Article in Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
42 citing papers in PubMed, 93 citations in OpenAlex.
- A Hitchhiker's Guide to Physical and Cognitive Effort.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2026Review
- Eye Tracking Insights Into Movement Preparation and Execution Under Nonstandard Visual Movement Feedback.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- The influence of subjective confidence on speed perception in peripheral vision.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Acute physiological and pupillary responses during power snatch and clean & jerk training sessions in elite female weightlifters.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Including Eye Movement in the Assessment of Physical Fatigue Under Different Loading Types and Road Slopes.Journal of eye movement research · 2026Article
- Dynamic causal modelling highlights the importance of decreased self-inhibition of the sensorimotor cortex in motor fatigability.Brain structure & function · 2024Article
- Pupillometry as a biomarker of postural control: Deep-learning models reveal side-specific pupillary responses to increased intensity of balance tasks.Psychophysiology · 2024Article
- Evaluating the effectiveness of quantitative pupillometry in assessing dynamic aerobic training intensity.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Value Estimation versus Effort Mobilization: A General Dissociation between Ventromedial and Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Resistance exercising on unstable surface leads to Pupil Dilation.BMC sports science, medicine & rehabilitation · 2024Article
- The interplay of sensory feedback, arousal, and action tremor amplitude in essential tremor.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Pupillometry as a new window to player fatigue? A glimpse inside the eyes of a Euro Cup Women's Basketball team.Biology of sport · 2024Article
- Pupil diameter tracked during motor adaptation in humans.Journal of neurophysiology · 2022Article
- Shouting strengthens voluntary force during sustained maximal effort through enhancement of motor system state via motor commands.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Pupil-linked arousal with very light exercise: pattern of pupil dilation during graded exercise.The journal of physiological sciences : JPS · 2022Article
- Cultural differences in vocal emotion recognition: a behavioural and skin conductance study in Portugal and Guinea-Bissau.Psychological research · 2022Article
- Article
- Bibliometric analysis of the effects of mental fatigue on athletic performance from 2001 to 2021.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
- Locus coeruleus neurons encode the subjective difficulty of triggering and executing actions.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- Shouting strengthens maximal voluntary force and is associated with augmented pupillary dilation.Scientific reports · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It has long been established that the pupil diameter increases during mental activities in proportion to the difficulty of the task at hand. However, it is still unclear whether this relationship between the pupil size and effort applies also to physical effort. In order to address this issue, we asked healthy volunteers to perform a power grip task, at varied intensity, while evaluating their effort both implicitly and explicitly, and while concurrently monitoring their pupil size. Each trial started with a contraction of imposed intensity, under the control of a continuous visual feedback. Upon completion of the contraction, participants had to choose whether to replicate, without feedback, the first contraction for a variable monetary reward, or whether to skip this step and go directly to the next trial. The rate of acceptance of effort replication and the amount of force exerted during the replication were used as implicit measures of the perception of the effort exerted during the first contraction. In addition, the participants were asked to rate on an analog scale, their explicit perception of the effort for each intensity condition. We found that pupil diameter increased during physical effort and that the magnitude of this response reflected not only the actual intensity of the contraction but also the subjects' perception of the effort. This finding indicates that the pupil size signals the level of effort invested in a task, irrespective of whether it is physical or mental. It also helps refining the potential brain circuits involved since the results of the current study imply a convergence of mental and physical effort information at some level along this pathway.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.