ArticleJournal of cognition2018
Pupil Mimicry is the Result of Brightness Perception of the Iris and Pupil.
Article in Journal of cognition, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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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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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Attachment is in the eye of the beholder: a pupillometry study on emotion processing.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Haptic feedback as affective amplifier: enhanced fear perception affects cognitive performance and avoidance actions in VR height exposure.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Eye movements and user emotional experience: a study in interface design.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Pupil dilation reflects the social and motion content of faces.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Open-DPSM: An open-source toolkit for modeling pupil size changes to dynamic visual inputs.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Pupil contagion variation with gaze, arousal, and autistic traits.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Pupil size variations reveal covert shifts of attention induced by numbers.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Article
- Small Pupils Lead to Lower Judgements of a Person's Characteristics for Exaggerated, but Not for Realistic Pupils.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- The pupil near response is short lasting and intact in virtual reality head mounted displays.Journal of eye movement research · 2022Article
- Individual pupil size changes as a robust indicator of cognitive familiarity differences.PloS one · 2022Article
- Reaction time coupling in a joint stimulus-response task: A matter of functional actions or likable agents?PloS one · 2022Article
- Enlargement of female pupils when perceiving something cute.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Face-Specific Pupil Contagion in Infants.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Pupillometric investigation into the speed-accuracy trade-off in a visuo-motor aiming task.Psychophysiology · 2020Article
- Reply to Mathôt and Naber: Neuroimaging shows that pupil mimicry is a social phenomenon.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- There is no evidence that pupil mimicry is a social phenomenon.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recent scientific investigations suggest that people automatically mimic each other's pupil sizes during interaction. However, instead of being a social mimicry effect, it could also be the result of brightness perception. When observers look at individuals with dilated pupils, little of the brighter iris is visible, leading to the perception of a relatively low-illuminated eye region. In the current study we tested whether pupil mimicry remains present when pupils and irises are equalized for luminance values across pupil sizes. We tested several stimulus sets, including faces with static pupils that varied in size across images and dynamic pupils that changed in size over time in videos. Results showed that for traditional, not-luminance-equalized videos, participants' pupil sizes adapted to the observed pupils, showing a pattern that is roughly in line with pupil mimicry. However, no such pupil response in line with mimicry was seen for static images (regardless of whether they were equalized for luminance) nor for luminance-equalized videos. These findings suggest that only salient, dynamic stimuli attract enough attention to the luminance in the eye region to evoke a pupillary response. However, although such responses suggest pupil mimicry, the underlying factor is the change in brightness within the eye as a function of pupil size rather than social mimicry.
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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.