Trani Alexandra, Verhaeghen Paul
School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2018 Oct;71(10):2235-2248. doi: 10.1177/1747021817740856. Epub 2018 Jan 1.
We investigated pupil dilation in 96 subjects during task preparation and during a post-trial interval in a visual search task and an auditory working memory task. Completely informative difficulty cues (easy, medium, or hard) were presented right before task preparation to examine whether pupil dilation indicated advance mobilisation of attentional resources; functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have argued for the existence of such task preparation, and the literature shows that pupil dilation tracks attentional effort during task performance. We found, however, little evidence for such task preparation. In the working memory task, pupil size was identical across cues, and although pupil dilation in the visual search task tracked the cue, pupil dilation predicted subsequent performance in neither task. Pupil dilation patterns in the post-trial interval were more consistent with an effect of emotional reactivity. Our findings suggest that the mobilisation of attentional resources in the service of the task does not occur during the preparatory interval, but is delayed until the task itself is initiated.
我们在96名受试者执行视觉搜索任务和听觉工作记忆任务的准备阶段以及试验后间隔期间，对瞳孔扩张情况进行了调查。在任务准备阶段之前，会呈现完全信息性的难度提示（简单、中等或困难），以检验瞳孔扩张是否表明注意力资源的提前调动；功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究支持存在这样的任务准备阶段，并且文献表明，瞳孔扩张在任务执行过程中跟踪注意力努力程度。然而，我们几乎没有找到支持这种任务准备阶段的证据。在工作记忆任务中，不同提示下的瞳孔大小相同，虽然视觉搜索任务中的瞳孔扩张跟踪了提示，但在这两个任务中，瞳孔扩张均无法预测后续表现。试验后间隔期间的瞳孔扩张模式更符合情绪反应的影响。我们的研究结果表明，为任务调动注意力资源并非在准备阶段发生，而是延迟到任务本身启动时才出现。
