Spectral signature and behavioral consequence of spontaneous shifts of pupil-linked arousal in human
- New York University School of Medicine, United States
Abstract
Arousal levels perpetually rise and fall spontaneously. How markers of arousal - pupil size and frequency content of brain activity - relate to each other and influence behavior in humans is poorly understood. We simultaneously monitored magnetoencephalography and pupil in healthy volunteers at rest and during a visual perceptual decision-making task. Spontaneously varying pupil size correlates with power of brain activity in most frequency bands across large-scale resting-state cortical networks. Pupil size recorded at prestimulus baseline correlates with subsequent shifts in detection bias (c) and sensitivity (d'). When dissociated from pupil-linked state, prestimulus spectral power of resting state networks still predicts perceptual behavior. Fast spontaneous pupil constriction and dilation correlate with large-scale brain activity as well but not perceptual behavior. Our results illuminate the relation between central and peripheral arousal markers and their respective roles in human perceptual decision-making.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. Source data are available as csv files for all figures except for whole brain images.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Science Foundation (BCS- 1753218)
- Biyu J He
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All participants provided written informed consent. The experiment was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (protocol #14-N-0002).
Copyright
© 2021, Podvalny et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Spectral signature and behavioral consequence of spontaneous shifts of pupil-linked arousal in human
eLife 10:e68265.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.68265
