ArticleeLife2023
Pupil size reflects activation of subcortical ascending arousal system nuclei during rest.
Article in eLife, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Evidence for domain-general arousal from semantic and neuroimaging meta-analyses reconciles opposing views on arousal.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Pooled it
- 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
- Modality-general sensitivity of pupil responses to regularity violations.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Pupil size is linked to opposite signal fluctuations between cortical BOLD and ventricular CSF.NeuroImage · 2026Article
- Article
- Cortical synchrony is reduced in Alzheimer's disease and relates to arousal state.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 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
- Psilocybin shapes the slow, global propagation of brain activity over the cortical layout of 5HT2a receptors.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
- Map-like representations of emotion knowledge in hippocampal-prefrontal systems.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- Sound-evoked pupil dilation quantifies misophonic symptoms.PloS one · 2026Article
- Pupillary Hippus as a Biomarker: Spectral Signatures and Complexity Approaches in Autonomic and Clinical Contexts.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Attentional failures after sleep deprivation are locked to joint neurovascular, pupil and cerebrospinal fluid flow dynamics.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- Timing Is Everything: Temporal Dynamics of BOLD Responses to Naturalistic Features in Movie Watching.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- 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
- Neuromodulatory influences on propagation of traveling waves along the unimodal-transmodal gradient.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Modulating cortical excitability and cortical arousal by pupil self-regulation.Nature communications · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Neuromodulatory nuclei that are part of the ascending arousal system (AAS) play a crucial role in regulating cortical state and optimizing task performance. Pupil diameter, under constant luminance conditions, is increasingly used as an index of activity of these AAS nuclei. Indeed, task-based functional imaging studies in humans have begun to provide evidence of stimulus-driven pupil-AAS coupling. However, whether there is such a tight pupil-AAS coupling during rest is not clear. To address this question, we examined simultaneously acquired resting-state fMRI and pupil-size data from 74 participants, focusing on six AAS nuclei: the locus coeruleus, ventral tegmental area, substantia nigra, dorsal and median raphe nuclei, and cholinergic basal forebrain. Activation in all six AAS nuclei was optimally correlated with pupil size at 0-2 s lags, suggesting that spontaneous pupil changes were almost immediately followed by corresponding BOLD-signal changes in the AAS. These results suggest that spontaneous changes in pupil size that occur during states of rest can be used as a noninvasive general index of activity in AAS nuclei. Importantly, the nature of pupil-AAS coupling during rest appears to be vastly different from the relatively slow canonical hemodynamic response function that has been used to characterize task-related pupil-AAS coupling.
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