ArticleeLife2022
Pupil diameter is not an accurate real-time readout of locus coeruleus activity.
Article in eLife, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT07402356 (Task-evoked Pupillometry in AD, MCI, and Depression-Related Cognitive Impairment), which is not on this map. Cited by 60 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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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.
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.
Task-evoked Pupillometry in AD, MCI, and Depression-Related Cognitive Impairment
Who cites it
60 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 103 citations in OpenAlex.
- Look into my eyes: What can eye-based measures tell us about the relationship between physical activity and cognitive performance?Journal of sport and health science · 2023Pooled it
- 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
- eyeris: A Flexible, Extensible, and Reproducible Pupillometry Preprocessing Framework in R.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Regulation of the decision threshold by the locus coeruleus.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Modality-general sensitivity of pupil responses to regularity violations.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Pupil-Brain System at Rest: Spontaneous Pupil Fluctuations as Markers of Neuromodulatory and Network Dynamics.Psychophysiology · 2026Review
- The anterior cingulate cortex modulates pupil-linked arousal.Science advances · 2026Article
- Locus-Coeruleus Norepinephrine Functioning as a Predictor of Childhood Mental Health (LOCUS-MENTAL): Protocol for a Longitudinal Study.JMIR research protocols · 2026Article
- Locus coeruleus modulation of neurophysiological sensory selectivity differs in autism and other mental health conditions.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Linking reaction time variability to physiological markers of arousal across timescales.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Acute physiological and pupillary responses during power snatch and clean & jerk training sessions in elite female weightlifters.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Roles of target detection and behavioral response on pupil dilation and concurrent memory: An attentional boost study.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- Behavioral state-dependent norepinephrine dynamics in the primary somatosensory and prefrontal cortices during tactile detection tasks.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Pupillary Hippus as a Biomarker: Spectral Signatures and Complexity Approaches in Autonomic and Clinical Contexts.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Multiunit and oscillatory activity in macaque V1 is modulated by blinking in a context-dependent way.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Building a construct-valid battery of performance and self-report indicators of sustained attention consistency.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Locus coeruleus tonic upregulation increases selectivity to inconspicuous auditory information in autistic compared to non-autistic individuals: a combined pupillometry and electroencephalography study.Molecular autism · 2025Article
- Phase synchrony between prefrontal noradrenergic and cholinergic signals indexes inhibitory control.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The Interplay Between Tonic and Phasic Pupil Activity and Cognitive Flexibility and Stability.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- A novel method for modeling tonic and phasic pupil dynamics in humans.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Pupil diameter is often treated as a noninvasive readout of activity in the locus coeruleus (LC). However, how accurately it can be used to index LC activity is not known. To address this question, we established a graded relationship between pupil size changes and LC spiking activity in mice, where pupil dilation increased monotonically with the number of LC spikes. However, this relationship exists with substantial variability such that pupil diameter can only be used to accurately predict a small fraction of LC activity on a moment-by-moment basis. In addition, pupil exhibited large session-to-session fluctuations in response to identical optical stimulation in the LC. The variations in the pupil-LC relationship were strongly correlated with decision bias-related behavioral variables. Together, our data show that substantial variability exists in an overall graded relationship between pupil diameter and LC activity, and further suggest that the pupil-LC relationship is dynamically modulated by brain states, supporting and extending our previous findings (Yang et al., 2021).
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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.