ReviewTrends in cognitive sciences2020
Pupil Size as a Window on Neural Substrates of Cognition.
Review in Trends in cognitive sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 325 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
325 citing papers in PubMed, 615 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pharmacological and pupillary evidence for the noradrenergic contribution to reinforcement learning in Parkinson's disease.Communications biology · 2025Trial
- Improvement of mnemonic discrimination with acute light exercise is mediated by pupil-linked arousal in healthy older adults.Neurobiology of aging · 2024Trial
- Article
- Lapses of attention.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Nurses' Visual Attention During Initial Observation of Patients With Suspected Pneumonia: An Observational Pupillometry Study.Japan journal of nursing science : JJNS · 2026Observational
- Fluctuations in arousal reflect latent state transitions that facilitate behavioural optimization.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Arousal-driven critical roaming reproduces human functional connectivity dynamics.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Pre-stimulus pupil-linked arousal enhances initial stimulus availability and accelerates decay in iconic memory.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- Task-irrelevant stimuli robustly drive phasic pupil-linked arousal but only weakly affect memory formation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- A Hitchhiker's Guide to Physical and Cognitive Effort.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2026Review
- Modality-general sensitivity of pupil responses to regularity violations.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- eyeris: A Flexible, Extensible, and Reproducible Pupillometry Preprocessing Framework in R.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Eye Tracking Insights Into Movement Preparation and Execution Under Nonstandard Visual Movement Feedback.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
- Regulation of the decision threshold by the locus coeruleus.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Medial premotor cortex as a potential reservoir of reward expectancy signals influencing the primate frontoparietal network.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Joint infrared pupil images and near-corneal-plane spectral light exposure data under natural conditions.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Ambulation improves memory for rotated scenes.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Quantitative pupillometry as a marker of autonomic dysregulation in vestibular migraine.Journal of oral & facial pain and headache · 2026Article
265 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 at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Cognitively driven pupil modulations reflect certain underlying brain functions. What do these reflections tell us? Here, we review findings that have identified key roles for three neural systems: cortical modulation of the pretectal olivary nucleus (PON), which controls the pupillary light reflex; the superior colliculus (SC), which mediates orienting responses, including pupil changes to salient stimuli; and the locus coeruleus (LC)-norepinephrine (NE) neuromodulatory system, which mediates relationships between pupil-linked arousal and cognition. We discuss how these findings can inform the interpretation of pupil measurements in terms of activation of these neural systems. We also highlight caveats, open questions, and key directions for future experiments for improving these interpretations in terms of the underlying neural dynamics throughout the brain.
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.