Kong Zhiming, Chen Chen, Jia Jianrong
Department of Psychology, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.
Zhejiang Philosophy and Social Science Laboratory for Research in Early Development and Childcare, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.
J Vis. 2025 Jan 2;25(1):14. doi: 10.1167/jov.25.1.14.
Beyond the light reflex, the pupil responds to various high-level cognitive processes. Multiple statistical regularities of stimuli have been found to modulate the pupillary response. However, most studies have used auditory or visual temporal sequences as stimuli, and it is unknown whether the pupil size is modulated by statistical regularity in the spatial arrangement of stimuli. In three experiments, we created perceived regular and irregular stimuli, matching physical regularity, to investigate the effect of spatial regularity on pupillary responses during passive viewing. Experiments using orientation (Experiments 1 and 2) and size (Experiment 3) as stimuli consistently showed that perceived irregular stimuli elicited more pupil constriction than regular stimuli. Furthermore, this effect was independent of the luminance of the stimuli. In conclusion, our study revealed that the pupil responds spontaneously to perceived visuospatial regularity, extending the stimulus regularity that influences the pupillary response into the visuospatial domain.
除了光反射外，瞳孔还会对各种高级认知过程做出反应。已发现刺激的多种统计规律会调节瞳孔反应。然而，大多数研究使用听觉或视觉时间序列作为刺激，尚不清楚瞳孔大小是否会受到刺激空间排列中的统计规律的调节。在三项实验中，我们创建了与物理规律相匹配的可感知的规则和不规则刺激，以研究被动观看期间空间规律对瞳孔反应的影响。使用方向（实验1和2）和大小（实验3）作为刺激的实验一致表明，可感知的不规则刺激比规则刺激引起更多的瞳孔收缩。此外，这种效应与刺激的亮度无关。总之，我们的研究表明，瞳孔会对可感知的视觉空间规律自发做出反应，将影响瞳孔反应的刺激规律扩展到视觉空间领域。
