ReviewPsychonomic bulletin & review2018
Pupil dilation as an index of effort in cognitive control tasks: A review.
Review in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 296 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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
296 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A systematic review of eye movements during autobiographical recall: Does the mind's eye look at pictures of personal memories?Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Pooled it
- Vasopressin and angiotensin II pathways differentially modulate human fear response dynamics to looming threats.PLoS biology · 2026Trial
- Individualized Cognitive Effort to Failure Does Not Affect Subsequent Strenuous Physical Performance.Medicine and science in sports and exercise · 2025Trial
- Eye Tracking and AI-Generated Content: A Systematic Literature Review of Visual Attention, Cognitive Processing, and User Engagement.Journal of eye movement research · 2026Review
- Attenuated selective attention during visual perspective taking in autism: A combined behavior, ERP, and pupillometry study.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Article
- Task-irrelevant stimuli robustly drive phasic pupil-linked arousal but only weakly affect memory formation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- How Source Attribution Visualization Shapes User Attention and Preference: An Eye-Tracking Study of Four AI Chatbot Layouts.Journal of eye movement research · 2026Article
- A Hitchhiker's Guide to Physical and Cognitive Effort.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2026Review
- Normoxic brain endurance training is associated with cognitive and oculomotor performance during acute hypoxia.European journal of applied physiology · 2026Article
- Comparing Aha! Moments in Problem Solving and Generative Ideation.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- Eye Tracking Insights Into Movement Preparation and Execution Under Nonstandard Visual Movement Feedback.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- eyeris: A Flexible, Extensible, and Reproducible Pupillometry Preprocessing Framework in R.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Valence-Arousal Asymmetry: Rethinking Facial Emotion Recognition in Preschool Autism Through Eye-Tracking.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2026Article
- Impact of Stimulus Size and Cognitive Demand on Accommodation and Pupil Size in Children and Adults.Ophthalmic & physiological optics : the journal of the British College of Ophthalmic Opticians (Optometrists) · 2026Article
- Multimodal EEG and Eye-Tracking Assessment of Perceived Mental Workload and Situation Awareness in a Visual Display Terminal Simulation Task.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Beyond Performance: Cognitive Overload and Related Cognitive, Psychophysiological, and Performance States in Competitive Esports-A Scoping Review.Medical sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Ambulation improves memory for rotated scenes.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Content-Independent Pointers Mediate Working Memory Storage for Both Visual and Verbal Stimuli.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Residual gaze behaviour during navigation in blindness and low vision.Disability and rehabilitation. Assistive technology · 2026Review
- Eye-Tracking-Based Evaluation of Cognitive Style and Driving Task Effects on AR-HUD Navigation Interfaces.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
236 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.
Funding
Abstract
Pupillometry research has experienced an enormous revival in the last two decades. Here we briefly review the surge of recent studies on task-evoked pupil dilation in the context of cognitive control tasks with the primary aim being to evaluate the feasibility of using pupil dilation as an index of effort exertion, rather than task demand or difficulty. Our review shows that across the three cognitive control domains of updating, switching, and inhibition, increases in task demands typically leads to increases in pupil dilation. Studies show a diverging pattern with respect to the relationship between pupil dilation and performance and we show how an effort account of pupil dilation can provide an explanation of these findings. We also discuss future directions to further corroborate this account in the context of recent theories on cognitive control and effort and their potential neurobiological substrates.
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.