ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2022
Pupil size variations reveal covert shifts of attention induced by numbers.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- The internal representation of fractions: component, holistic or hybrid?Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Lexical priming of space depends on how deeply you think about it.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Acute Mental Stress is Associated With Altered Pupillary Light Reflex.Physiological research · 2025Article
- Uncovering Distinct Drivers of Covert Attention in Complex Environments With Pupillometry.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- What pupil size can and cannot tell about math anxiety.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Early detection of cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease using eye tracking.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2023Article
- Frequency dependence of coordinated pupil and eye movements for binocular disparity tracking.Frontiers in neurology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The pupil light response is more than a pure reflexive mechanism that reacts to the amount of light entering the eye. The pupil size may also react to the luminance of objects lying in the visual periphery, revealing the locus of covert attention. In the present study, we took advantage of this response to study the spatial coding of abstract concepts with no physical counterpart: numbers. The participants' gaze was maintained fixed in the middle of a screen whose left and right parts were dark or bright, and variations in pupil size were recorded during an auditory number comparison task. The results showed that small numbers accentuated pupil dilation when the darker part of the screen was on the left, while large numbers accentuated pupil dilation when the darker part of the screen was on the right. This finding provides direct evidence for covert attention shifts on a left-to-right oriented mental spatial representation of numbers. From a more general perspective, it shows that the pupillary response to light is subject to modulation from spatial attention mechanisms operating on mental contents.
Indexed as
Identifiers
35384595What 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.