ArticlePsychophysiology2017
A pupil size response model to assess fear learning.
Article in Psychophysiology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
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Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed.
- The impact of doxycycline on human contextual fear memory.Psychopharmacology · 2024Trial
- Effect of the Matrix Metalloproteinase Inhibitor Doxycycline on Human Trace Fear Memory.eNeuro · 2023Trial
- Attentional processing in individual anxiety: Electrocortical correlates of threat- and safety-related declarative memory formation.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Phoneme Monitoring in Developmental Dyslexia: Pupillometric Evidence for Cognitive Rather than Acoustic Origins of Phonological Deficits.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Experiment-based calibration: Inference and decision-making.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Psychophysiological Outcome Responses in Human Pavlovian Fear Conditioning: A Prediction Error Analysis.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Eye-Tracking-BIDS: the Brain Imaging Data Structure extended to gaze position and pupil data.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Bayesian multilevel modeling of group and participant level effect sizes: Stronger inter-individual differences in pupil dilation compared to EEG alpha power during aversive conditioning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Intra-individual comparison of appetitive trace and delay conditioning in humans across acquisition and extinction.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- A contextual fear conditioning paradigm in head-fixed mice exploring virtual reality.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Measuring Human Pavlovian Reward Conditioning and Memory Retention After Consolidation.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Bodily illusion enhances subjective fear of safety-margin violations surrounding the bodily self.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Neuropsychobiology of fear-induced bradycardia in humans: progress and pitfalls.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Review
- Open-DPSM: An open-source toolkit for modeling pupil size changes to dynamic visual inputs.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Dimensionality and optimal combination of autonomic fear-conditioning measures in humans.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Pupillary Responses Reflect Dynamic Changes in Multiple Cognitive Factors During Associative Learning in Primates.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Control of defensive behavior by the nucleus of Darkschewitsch GABAergic neurons.National science review · 2024Article
- From pre-processing to advanced dynamic modeling of pupil data.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Acceleration of inferred neural responses to oddball targets in an individual with bilateral amygdala lesion compared to healthy controls.Scientific reports · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
During fear conditioning, pupil size responses dissociate between conditioned stimuli that are contingently paired (CS+) with an aversive unconditioned stimulus, and those that are unpaired (CS-). Current approaches to assess fear learning from pupil responses rely on ad hoc specifications. Here, we sought to develop a psychophysiological model (PsPM) in which pupil responses are characterized by response functions within the framework of a linear time-invariant system. This PsPM can be written as a general linear model, which is inverted to yield amplitude estimates of the eliciting process in the central nervous system. We first characterized fear-conditioned pupil size responses based on an experiment with auditory CS. PsPM-based parameter estimates distinguished CS+/CS- better than, or on par with, two commonly used methods (peak scoring, area under the curve). We validated this PsPM in four independent experiments with auditory, visual, and somatosensory CS, as well as short (3.5 s) and medium (6 s) CS/US intervals. Overall, the new PsPM provided equal or decisively better differentiation of CS+/CS- than the two alternative methods and was never decisively worse. We further compared pupil responses with concurrently measured skin conductance and heart period responses. Finally, we used our previously developed luminance-related pupil responses to infer the timing of the likely neural input into the pupillary system. Overall, we establish a new PsPM to assess fear conditioning based on pupil responses. The model has a potential to provide higher statistical sensitivity, can be applied to other conditioning paradigms in humans, and may be easily extended to nonhuman mammals.
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