Relationships between pupil diameter and neuronal activity in the locus coeruleus, colliculi, and cingulate cortex

By S. Joshi, Yin Li, R. Kalwani, Joshua I. Gold. Neuron, 2015

1,244 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SUMMARY Changes in pupil diameter that reflect effort and other cognitive factors are often interpreted in terms of the activity of norepinephrine-containing neurons in the brainstem nucleus locus coeruleus (LC), but there is little direct evidence for such a relationship. Here we show that LC activation reliably anticipates changes in pupil diameter that either fluctuate naturally or are driven by external events during near fixation, as in many psychophysical tasks. This relationship occurs on as fine a temporal and spatial scale as single spikes from single units. However, this relationship is not specific to the LC. Similar relationships, albeit with delayed timing and different reliabilities across sites, are evident in the inferior and superior colliculus and anterior and posterior cingulate cortex. Because these regions are interconnected with the LC, the results suggest that non-luminance-mediated changes in pupil diameter might reflect LC-mediated coordination of neuronal activity throughout some parts of the brain.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sensory Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/32bfeba4fb2e3e6d3e1dd184324b7b929f9159aa

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Citations in the corpus

Pupillometry: Psychology, Physiology, and Function (2018, methodology): “Kahneman & Beatty (1966) have shown that the pupil dilates when you keep items in working memory; this is an effect of mental effort, which we will get back to below in the section on the psychosensory pupil response.”
Beyond eye gaze: What else can eyetracking reveal about cognition and cognitive development? (2016, background): “3; Costa and Rudebeck, 2016; Joshi et al., 2016; Rajkowski et al., 1993; Varazzani et al., 2015), and fMRI studies have shown corresponding links between LC BOLD signals and pupil diameter in humans (Alnaes et al., 2014; Murphy et al., 2014).”
The Dynamics of Functional Brain Networks: Integrated Network States during Cognitive Task Performance (2015, positive): “The locus coeruleus (Aston-Jones and Cohen, 2005) is known tomodulate pupil diameter (Joshi et al., 2016), and thus, by inference, may play a role in the modulation of fluctuations in global network topology through phasic alterations in neural gain (Eldar et al.”