Huang Jeff, Smorenburg Matthew L, Yep Rachel, Riek Heidi C, Calancie Olivia G, Kirkpatrick Ryan H, Brien Donald C, Coe Brian C, Wang Chin-An, Munoz Douglas P
Centre for Neuroscience Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada.
School of Medicine, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada.
Front Neurosci. 2024 Nov 19;18:1445727. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2024.1445727. eCollection 2024.
The pupil is modulated by luminance, arousal, bottom-up sensory, and top-down cognitive signals, and has increasingly been used to assess these aspects of brain functioning in health and disease. However, changes in pupil dynamics across the lifespan have not been extensively examined, hindering our ability to fully utilize the pupil in probing these underlying neural processes in development and aging in healthy and clinical cohorts. Here, we examined pupil responses during the interleaved pro-/anti-saccade task (IPAST) in healthy participants across the lifespan ( = 567, 5-93 years of age). Based on the extracted measurements of pupil dynamics, we demonstrated age-related changes in pupil measures and task modulation. Moreover, we characterized the underlying factors and age-related effects in components of pupil responses that may be attributed to developmental and aging changes in the associated brain regions. Finally, correlations between factors of pupil dynamics and saccade behaviors revealed evidence of shared neural processes in the pupil and saccade control circuitries. Together, these results demonstrate changes in pupil dynamics as a result of development and aging, providing a baseline with which altered pupil responses due to neurological deficits at different ages can be studied.
瞳孔受亮度、觉醒、自下而上的感觉和自上而下的认知信号调节，并且越来越多地被用于评估健康和疾病状态下大脑功能的这些方面。然而，整个生命周期中瞳孔动态的变化尚未得到广泛研究，这阻碍了我们在健康和临床队列中充分利用瞳孔来探究发育和衰老过程中这些潜在神经过程的能力。在此，我们研究了整个生命周期（n = 567，年龄在5至93岁之间）的健康参与者在交错的正/反扫视任务（IPAST）期间的瞳孔反应。基于提取的瞳孔动态测量结果，我们展示了瞳孔测量和任务调节中与年龄相关的变化。此外，我们对瞳孔反应成分中的潜在因素和与年龄相关的影响进行了特征描述，这些因素可能归因于相关脑区的发育和衰老变化。最后，瞳孔动态因素与扫视行为之间的相关性揭示了瞳孔和扫视控制回路中共享神经过程的证据。总之，这些结果证明了发育和衰老导致的瞳孔动态变化，为研究不同年龄因神经功能缺损而改变的瞳孔反应提供了一个基线。
