ArticleeLife2020
Pupil-linked phasic arousal predicts a reduction of choice bias across species and decision domains.
Article in eLife, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 72 papers.
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Who cites it
72 citing papers in PubMed, 137 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pharmacological and pupillary evidence for the noradrenergic contribution to reinforcement learning in Parkinson's disease.Communications biology · 2025Trial
- Fluctuations in arousal reflect latent state transitions that facilitate behavioural optimization.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Task-irrelevant stimuli robustly drive phasic pupil-linked arousal but only weakly affect memory formation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The selective dynamics of proactive and reactive control in GAD: A taVNS study using hierarchical drift diffusion modeling.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- The anterior cingulate cortex modulates pupil-linked arousal.Science advances · 2026Article
- Respiration as a dynamic modulator of sensory sampling.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Pupil-linked arousal heterogeneously modulates cell-type-specific sensory processing.Science advances · 2026Article
- Attenuated pupillary response during visual search in preclinical Alzheimer's disease.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Article
- Phasic and tonic arousal distinctly shape human decision bias.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Pupil dilation as a marker of attention/effort in aging and mild cognitive impairment.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Article
- Inhibitory control deficits in problematic short-form video users: evidence from drift diffusion model.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- The Contribution of the Locus Ceruleus-Norepinephrine System to the Coupling between Pupil-Linked Arousal and Cortical State.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Pupillary dynamics during hands-off L2 driving and transitions of control under high cognitive load.PloS one · 2026Article
- Brain-wide analysis reveals movement encoding structured across and within brain areas.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Pupil size predicts exploration through critical slowing in prefrontal dynamics.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Cognitive training shapes brain plasticity and schematic representations.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2025Review
- Catecholamines reduce choice history biases in perceptual decision making.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Pupil size predicts the onset of exploration and changes in prefrontal dynamics.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Adaptive arousal regulation: Pharmacologically shifting the peak of the Yerkes-Dodson curve by catecholaminergic enhancement of arousal.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
12 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Decisions are often made by accumulating ambiguous evidence over time. The brain's arousal systems are activated during such decisions. In previous work in humans, we found that evoked responses of arousal systems during decisions are reported by rapid dilations of the pupil and track a suppression of biases in the accumulation of decision-relevant evidence (de Gee et al., 2017). Here, we show that this arousal-related suppression in decision bias acts on both conservative and liberal biases, and generalizes from humans to mice, and from perceptual to memory-based decisions. In challenging sound-detection tasks, the impact of spontaneous or experimentally induced choice biases was reduced under high phasic arousal. Similar bias suppression occurred when evidence was drawn from memory. All of these behavioral effects were explained by reduced evidence accumulation biases. Our results point to a general principle of interplay between phasic arousal and decision-making.
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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.