Department of Translational Research on New Technologies in Medicine and Surgery, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy.
CNR Neuroscience Institute, Pisa, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2017 Aug 31;7(1):10283. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-10816-x.
Covertly shifting attention to a brighter or darker image (without moving one's eyes) is sufficient to evoke pupillary constriction or dilation, respectively. One possibility is that this attentional modulation involves the pupillary light response pathway, which pivots around the olivary pretectal nucleus. We investigate this possibility by studying patients with Parinaud's syndrome, where the normal pupillary light response is strongly impaired due to lesions in the pretectal area. Four patients and nine control participants covertly attended (while maintaining fixation at the center of a monitor screen) to one of two disks located in the left and right periphery: one brighter, the other darker than the background. Patients and control subjects behaved alike, showing smaller pupils when attending to the brighter stimulus (despite no eye movements); consistent results were obtained with a dynamic version of the stimulus. We interpret this as proof of principle that attention to bright or dark stimuli can dynamically modulate pupil size in patients with Parinaud's syndrome, suggesting that attention acts independently of the pretectal circuit for the pupillary light response and indicating that several components of the pupillary response can be isolated - including one related to the focus of covert attention.
将注意力暗中转移到更亮或更暗的图像（不移动眼睛）足以分别引起瞳孔收缩或扩张。一种可能性是，这种注意力调节涉及围绕橄榄状前脑桥核的瞳孔光反应途径。我们通过研究 Parinaud 综合征患者来研究这种可能性，由于视前区的病变，这些患者的正常瞳孔光反应受到严重损害。四名患者和九名对照参与者在注视显示器屏幕中心的同时，暗中注视两个位于左、右周边的圆盘之一：一个更亮，另一个比背景更暗。患者和对照组的表现相似，当注视更亮的刺激物时，瞳孔较小（尽管没有眼球运动）；使用刺激物的动态版本获得了一致的结果。我们将这解释为一个原理证明，即注意力可以动态调节 Parinaud 综合征患者的瞳孔大小，表明注意力独立于瞳孔光反应的视前区回路起作用，并表明瞳孔反应的几个组成部分可以被分离出来-包括与暗中注意焦点相关的一个组成部分。
