ReviewProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Eye pupil signals information gain.
Review in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Unveiling the Aha! moment: A computational account of insight in active inference.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Fluctuations in arousal reflect latent state transitions that facilitate behavioural optimization.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Article
- Pupillary dynamics during hands-off L2 driving and transitions of control under high cognitive load.PloS one · 2026Article
- Pupillary Hippus as a Biomarker: Spectral Signatures and Complexity Approaches in Autonomic and Clinical Contexts.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Eye movements as predictors of student experiences during nursing simulation learning events.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- Volatility-driven learning in human infants.Science advances · 2025Article
- What can ANS signals tell us about motor learning? An implication for better assessment of cognitive contribution to motor learning.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Eye pupils mirror information divergence in approximate inference.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Broadscale dampening of uncertainty adjustment in the aging brain.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Pupillary responses to directional uncertainty while intercepting a moving target.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Visuomotor predictors of interception.PloS one · 2024Article
- Introspective inference counteracts perceptual distortion.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Adaptive learning from outcome contingencies in eating-disorder risk groups.Translational psychiatry · 2023Article
- Pupillometric parameters of alertness during unpredictable but not predictable smooth pursuit neck torsion test are altered in patients with neck pain disorders: a cross-sectional study.Experimental brain research · 2023Article
- How uncertain are you? Disentangling expected and unexpected uncertainty in pupil-linked brain arousal during reversal learning.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Differentiating between Bayesian parameter learning and structure learning based on behavioural and pupil measures.PloS one · 2023Article
- Zoom behavior during visual search modulates pupil diameter and reflects adaptive control states.PloS one · 2023Article
- Pupil dilation and response slowing distinguish deliberate explorative choices in the probabilistic learning task.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In conditions of constant illumination, the eye pupil diameter indexes the modulation of arousal state and responds to a large breadth of cognitive processes, including mental effort, attention, surprise, decision processes, decision biases, value beliefs, uncertainty, volatility, exploitation/exploration trade-off, or learning rate. Here, I propose an information theoretic framework that has the potential to explain the ensemble of these findings as reflecting pupillary response to information processing. In short, updates of the brain's internal model, quantified formally as the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between prior and posterior beliefs, would be the common denominator to all these instances of pupillary dilation to cognition. I show that stimulus presentation leads to pupillary response that is proportional to the amount of information the stimulus carries about itself and to the quantity of information it provides about other task variables. In the context of decision making, pupil dilation in relation to uncertainty is explained by the wandering of the evidence accumulation process, leading to large summed KL divergences. Finally, pupillary response to mental effort and variations in tonic pupil size are also formalized in terms of information theory. On the basis of this framework, I compare pupillary data from past studies to simple information-theoretic simulations of task designs and show good correspondance with data across studies. The present framework has the potential to unify the large set of results reported on pupillary dilation to cognition and to provide a theory to guide future research.
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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.